Damelin is one of four colleges that has been deregistered by the department of education.
In 2007, the Council for Higher Education (CHE) conducted a review of how the sector had changed since the dawn of democracy in South Africa.
Among the biggest changes to this institutional landscape was the dramatic rise of private higher education in the late 1990s, which “challenged, if not undermined, the public higher education system just as it was emerging from its apartheid legacy”, according to the review.
Now, three decades since 1994, we are watching certain private higher education institutions come apart at the seams — leaving thousands of students in limbo as government officials point fingers in every direction but their own. This as the looming deregistration of CityVarsity, Damelin and two other private higher education institutions exposes the pitfalls of ignoring privatisation’s perils.
According to the CHE review, in the late 1990s, there was a view that South Africa’s public higher education sector was in need of assistance from private institutions to address the country’s skills shortage.
The review cites the 1997 white paper on higher education which noted the government’s expectation that private institutions would play an important role expanding access by responding to market forces.
“The key challenge in expanding the role of private institutions is to create an environment which neither suffocates educationally sound and sustainable private institutions with state over-regulation, nor allows a plethora of poor quality, unsustainable ‘fly-by-night’ operators into the higher education market,” the document added.
The CHE describes the government’s attitude to these higher education institutions at the time as laissez-faire, noting that the thought then was that privatisation would be insignificant or benign.
The white paper coincided with the implementation of the government’s Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) strategy, which — among other things — prescribed fiscal consolidation as a means of achieving economic stability.
The Gear strategy document noted that, with spending on education at nearly 7% of GDP at the time, there was “a need to contain expenditure through reductions in subsidisation of the more expensive parts of the system and greater private sector involvement in higher education”. The idea was that privatisation would allow the government to concentrate public resources on enhancing the educational opportunities of historically disadvantaged communities.
From 1999, however, attitudes towards private higher education institutions began to shift and they were subjected to stricter regulation.
In 2022, the CHE released another review of the sector since 1994, which pushed back against the view that the private higher education was solely profit driven, calling on the department of higher education to reassess this apparent misconception.
Said review also looked into government public higher education spending since democracy, flagging the slow growth of this funding in real terms. “Twenty-five years into democracy, South Africa continues to struggle to achieve a truly transformed higher education [sector],” the document notes.
“The policies to drive transformation are in place; however, implementation of these policies remains the challenge, not least because of inadequate levels of funding.”
The review later noted the deleterious effect of pandemic-era budget cuts, the full impact of which will probably only manifest in future years. Under these circumstances, it is no wonder that there is still some hope that private higher education will be a lifeline to the sector.
But the alleged governance failures at Educor-owned CityVarsity, Damelin, Icesa City Campus and Lyceum College suggest that private education institutions such as these are in need of greater scrutiny, lest more students be taken advantage of.
According to Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande, these institutions have allegedly misrepresented the size of their student cohort, paid staff late and given marks based on exam papers that were never marked by educators.
“That’s the worst sin that can be committed by an education institution, whether public or private,” Nzimande said about the latter offence.
Following the news, the South African Federation of Trade Unions noted that privatisation’s proponents believe that the sector makes for better and cheaper services, while also being more accountable and efficient.
“Educor has proven that all these are myths,” the labour federation said in a statement.
“The chronic understaffing at Damelin and its sister colleges, the incompetence and poor management that resulted in unfair labour practice, late payment of employees and the eventual bankruptcy are proof that the private sector is not the paragon of efficiency.”
While it might be true that Educor’s collapse is but an isolated incident, rather than an indictment of private higher education as a whole, we cannot afford to dismiss the sector’s failures as once-off flukes.
Because, at the end of the day, the role that private business plays in any sector — its strength or its weakness — has a direct bearing on policy decisions. And now, with privatisation’s promises seemingly broken, students are also left to deal with the consequences of the public sector’s defunding.