hundreds of Siphos in my seven years at the helm of UFS. Every time my administrator’s heart beaks. A careful reading of an academic record as a historical document will suggest one of two things: either Sipho should never have been admitted to university, given his matriculation certificate, or Sipho will never pass at a university level even if his original school certificate qualified him for tertiary studies.
Few university leaders understand that difficult transition from school to university better than Sizwe Mabizela, the vice-chancellor of Rhodes University. A kind-hearted man with boundless empathy for students, he once headed the quality assurance body that sets the standards for school-leaving certificates.
Sizwe Mabizela: What is actually happening and has been happening for a long time is that universities are receiving more and more students who are unprepared for higher education. And if you look at the performance of our public higher education system, the dropout rates are frightening. In fact, almost half of the young people who enrol at our public higher education institutions leave the system without a qualification of one kind or another. That, of course, is a colossal waste of human potential, and the reason why they’re in that predicament is that there aren’t any viable, attractive post-school education and training opportunities except university.
I’ve argued on a number of occasions that this country does not need more people with university degrees. What this country desperately needs at its level of development are more young people with artisanal skills. One can pour in money to deal with the funding of higher education. But that in and of itself will not make the significant difference, because you have young people in a public higher education system who should not have been there in the first place, who would have benefited by going to a TVET college. Unfortunately, those colleges are not institutions of choice at the moment. And so as part of resolving the challenges of higher education, we need to pay greater attention to our TVET colleges. Make them institutions of choice.
I’ve also made a lot of noise about the message that we send with our National Senior Certificates (NSCs): it is very problematic when you classify an NSC as a certificate, diploma, or bachelor pass. A bachelor pass sends the message that the person should go to university, and so anyone with a bachelor pass, which unfortunately does not take much to achieve, simply thinks of university. I wish we would change that classification so that some of those with a pass that is equivalent to a bachelor pass could see themselves going to a TVET college because that’s what would appeal to them.
The other thing that is very important relates to the curriculum in our higher education institutions. It is one thing to facilitate physical access to a university; it is quite another to facilitate what Wally Morrow [the late South African philosopher of education] refers to as ‘epistemological access’. That means access to knowledge, what knowledge is and how you construct knowledge, and all of that. We have succeeded in facilitating physical access, but I don’t think we have been that successful in facilitating access to knowledge. And that, of course, is reflected in the dropout rate that I referred to earlier.
If I had my way as far as higher education is concerned, I would cap the numbers and say no more growth, and if there is growth it has to be very small and controlled, and that we must pay attention to what is happening within the universities. Improve the pass and graduation rates. Improve the throughput rate. Those are absolutely abysmal, which is one of those things fuelling #FeesMustFall. You have young people who are frustrated, who come from poor families, and they just can’t make sense of what is happening at universities. They drop out in large numbers and that’s a mix that leads to incredible levels of frustration.
This frustration on the part of students is real, and university principals encounter it all the time, sometimes with dangerous consequences. For example, at UFS Sibusiso (not his real name), having once again failed his course, angrily confronted his lecturer. He threatened to get physical and started to throw things around in her office. She was mortified. When she told him the results were accurate, he called her a racist. She offered to refer his plea higher up. Eventually it reached my office. After a thorough review, I told him that multiple failures after repeated opportunities and assistance meant that he would not be able to pass the course. Sibusiso then threatened the lecturer’s life on social media. (An investigation revealed that he was the perpetrator, working from an off-campus site.) Personal security arrangements were made for the lecturer, and Sibusiso was expelled. Nevertheless he has found his way into the protest marches on campus. His intense frustration and anger mix in with the protest about student fees, helping to facilitate the addition of all kinds of other agendas onto the list of protestor demands – including accusations of racist lecturers and individual targeting. The real truth about Sibusiso’s case melts seamlessly into the heat of the protests.
Tuition fee hikes
As subsidies have come down, tuition fees have gone up. From 2000 to 2012, the government’s contribution to higher education decreased from 49 per cent to 40 per cent (and was as low as 38 per cent in 2014).8 In the same period, students’ contribution to university funding increased from 24 per cent to 31 per cent.9 As tuition fees increased from R12,2 billion to R15,5 billion between 2010 and 2012, student debt rose from R2,6 billion to R3,4 billion.10 In percentage terms, as a share of institutional funding tuition fees increased from 24 per cent in 2000 to 33 per cent in 2014.
The conclusion is straightforward: students could not afford the tuition hikes and the burden of debt became a reality, not only for those who graduated, but also for those who dropped out with debt and without a degree. It was a cruel calculus for the materially poor and academically disadvantaged.
Now to be clear, it is not that funded students paid the fee increases themselves, although there is little recognition of this simple fact in the protest movement. Moreover, government has substantially increased NSFAS funding in the past and present, and has promised to do so into the future. In 1991 the NSFAS funded 7 240 students to the tune of R21,4 million; by 2014 the scheme funded 409 475 students at a cost of R9 billion. Those on state funding – whether from the NSFAS, a more general fund, or the Funza Lushaka Bursary – were fully covered for most of their costs. If anything, the minister of higher education would complain from time to time that the tuition fee increases by the universities were pushing the NSFAS envelope, but the reality is that students were amply funded.
The students for whom the tuition fee increases were becoming a problem were poor students who did not qualify for NSFAS or Funza Lushaka funding, and students from middle-class families (the ‘missing middle’) who could not afford the escalating costs of studying at university. These are the groups among whom the pressure was building, as it was among those students for whom NSFAS had simply run out of funds. But the university protests were often led by middle-class and fully funded students presuming to lead on behalf of their poorer classmates. The vice-chancellor of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) makes a clear distinction between the truly poor and the better-off students:
Prins Nevhutalu: You hear all the time the discourse that informs the discussion around fee increases focused on UCT and Wits. It’s all about a ‘missing middle’, but parading it in the name of the poor students. So my argument to Max [Price] and Adam [Habib] is, you absolutely have no need for posturing. We carry the burden of the largest numbers of poor students. You cannot argue on behalf of poor students. Argue about your own institution and say you need more money from the state, but don’t hide behind the poverty of black people. The protests about fees originated on campuses that for me were not facing the harsh reality of poverty.
There is no question that the problem of inadequate NSFAS funding hits the poor the hardest, even as the burden has spread to middle-class students as well. And with every year that tuition fees increased beyond the rise in earnings of families in a stagnant economy, the predictable perfect storm came closer. In response to these pressures, frustration would push students into desperate acts. Put simply, fee increases on campuses compounded struggles with poverty in communities.
Lourens
