Analysts say protests being experienced at South Africa's universities are not only about the unaffordable cost of higher education. The underlying catalyst is that a university education will secure benefits – skills, a guaranteed chance of a well-paying job and mobility to the middle-class and prosperity out of poverty.
Experts say the dysfunctional education system – 80% of schools – mean only about 14% of school leavers qualify to go to university, and half of those who enrol dropout with nothing, except accumulated fee debt.
Almost everything the ANC has done regarding education has been disastrous:
Lost in protests about fees and transformation are structural challenges facing higher education. Young people and their parents want a university education despite the majority, 86%, not meeting the academic grade. Every so often, as an afterthought, vocational colleges, aka colleges of education, are mentioned as an alternative for this cohort.
Experts say the dysfunctional education system – 80% of schools – mean only about 14% of school leavers qualify to go to university, and half of those who enrol dropout with nothing, except accumulated fee debt.
Almost everything the ANC has done regarding education has been disastrous:
- Implementing outcomes based education against expert advice and the world’s experience and persisting with it despite the evidence.
- Closing teacher (and nursing) training colleges – some of them very good – and retrenching teachers despite the knowledge an excellent education can only be achieved through excellent educators. And now we face a shortage of teachers and a mediocre system that no amount of money can rectify.
- Granting teacher unions, some of whom place their members before their pupils, too much power to the detriment of the pupils.
- Abolishing the former, recognised apprenticeship programmes in favour of useless and costly sector education training authorities (Setas).
- Consolidating and merging universities and technikons when the educational and skills needs of the country must expand to meet a knowledge-based world economy.
- Unable to deliver learning materials and a safe learning environment to pupils and irrationally fighting numerous court cases to avoid that constitutional imperative (but ordering and delivering a superfluous R4 billion executive jet for the president can be accomplished within 6 months).
Lost in protests about fees and transformation are structural challenges facing higher education. Young people and their parents want a university education despite the majority, 86%, not meeting the academic grade. Every so often, as an afterthought, vocational colleges, aka colleges of education, are mentioned as an alternative for this cohort.
But with the irrational closure of formal apprenticeship programmes and downscaling of artisanal skills, these colleges may have fallen out of favour and perhaps looked upon as a step down and unable to meet the aspirations of potential candidates.
Universities themselves have not brought their considerable knowledge and influence to the problems that beset higher education and training except where it directly concerns them, for example, a flexible undergraduate curriculum structure, subsidies and racial transformation.
What is needed is a review of South Africa’s higher education system and not the ad hoc proposals we have seen so far. We could do worse than look at California’s public higher education system.
California has a population of 39 million. It has about 120 public and private colleges and universities and 113 community colleges. Their public higher education system provides mobility through the system from community colleges, to state university to the apex, University of California.
It’s impossible the country could provide the number or standard of California’s universities for our population of 51 million. But we have the bare structure – universities, universities of technology and vocational colleges. To meet the educational needs and expectations of people, the standards of the last two should be improved to simultaneously provide a foot in higher education and an opportunity of advancement through the system, which is largely absent in the status quo.
The desperation we have seen over the past few weeks is partly because few opportunities exist for young people who believe only a university education, preferably at the country’s top institutions, will deliver them from permanent economic disenfranchisement.
But all I have read about the crises, now and yesterday, are proposals about moving existing pieces around the board – costs, funding, pass rates, race, dropout rates and student numbers – when new players and a new game ought to be brought to the table.
See Blade's bold plan to nationalise training.
Previously published in the Cape Argus 2 December 2015 as "Root causes of education crisis"
Universities themselves have not brought their considerable knowledge and influence to the problems that beset higher education and training except where it directly concerns them, for example, a flexible undergraduate curriculum structure, subsidies and racial transformation.
What is needed is a review of South Africa’s higher education system and not the ad hoc proposals we have seen so far. We could do worse than look at California’s public higher education system.
California has a population of 39 million. It has about 120 public and private colleges and universities and 113 community colleges. Their public higher education system provides mobility through the system from community colleges, to state university to the apex, University of California.
It’s impossible the country could provide the number or standard of California’s universities for our population of 51 million. But we have the bare structure – universities, universities of technology and vocational colleges. To meet the educational needs and expectations of people, the standards of the last two should be improved to simultaneously provide a foot in higher education and an opportunity of advancement through the system, which is largely absent in the status quo.
The desperation we have seen over the past few weeks is partly because few opportunities exist for young people who believe only a university education, preferably at the country’s top institutions, will deliver them from permanent economic disenfranchisement.
But all I have read about the crises, now and yesterday, are proposals about moving existing pieces around the board – costs, funding, pass rates, race, dropout rates and student numbers – when new players and a new game ought to be brought to the table.
See Blade's bold plan to nationalise training.
Previously published in the Cape Argus 2 December 2015 as "Root causes of education crisis"
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