Students want to change the university, but there is less and less money to do so, writes Drew Forrest
SOUTH AFRICA’S universities are hurtling towards a cash crunch engendered by rising costs, sharply escalating student indebtedness and falling state subsidies.
For the new government, beset by the clamorous needs of other educational sectors and bent on holding down university spending, this poses an acute political dilemma.
Education Ministry adviser Theboho Moja this week told the Weekly Mail & Guardian that unpaid university fees had risen from R48-million in 1992 to R71-million at only 13 of the country’s 21 universities last year. This year, student debts stood at R236-million, while R48-million was outstanding at technikons.
At the same time, there have been strong indications that state subsidies to universities — which have fallen 20 percent in the recent past — will be further cut next year. “We believe the subsidy will be substantially less, and this will mean sharp belt-tightening,” said Wits vice-chancellor Professor Robert Charlton, who added that unpaid fees at Wits alone totalled R2-million in 1993.
The demand for a moratorium on the financial exclusion of students has been central to the upheavals at Wits University over the past fortnight.
On Wednesday the South African Students’ Congress marched on the offices of regional education minister Mary Metcalfe to demand the establishment of a national loan and bursary fund.
They have the support of university administrations, who see no alternative solution to their worsening cash crisis. And National Education Minister Sibusiso Bengu has lent his support to such a scheme.
But how it is to be financed is unclear. To meet the burgeoning needs of lower-income black students — 43 percent of the national university intake is now black — a fund containing hundreds of millions of rands will be necessary, Charlton estimates. It would have to make loans, repayable once students started earning, to ensure that funds were recycled.
But the ANC has pledged to hold down state spending on universities in the interests of expanding technikon education.
At talks with Sasco at the weekend, it reportedly said emergency funds were simply not available to halt financial exclusions. Foreign donors, according to Charlton, have been reluctant to fund students now that a democratic government is in power.
“This leaves the government with a difficult political problem,” Charlton said. “And I’m very keen that the government should take the rap and not me.” Saying that no students had been excluded from Wits this year on financial grounds, Charlton stressed that the university’s capacity was “not infinite”.
In an effort to hold down costs, departments had already been phased out, library services rationalised and resources shared with other institutions.
In terms of the university’s mission project — which set priorities “if funding became short” — Wits’ traditional strengths of mining, the sciences and engineering would be maintained, Charlton said. There was also a commitment to producing more managers for the private and public sector. But the threatened subsidy cut would inevitably mean the downscaling or closure of further departments.
It would also mean a harder line on students who failed, as 50 percent of the government subsidy was earned as students accumulated credits. “We have been lenient in the past, but we cannot continue to be so indefinitely,” Charlton said.