Karen MacGregor
THE number of African students registered at South African universities has trebled in the last 10 years – – and for the first time ever, last year more students were African than any other race group — according to the recently released Race Relations Survey 1994/95.
The growing representation of black people was even more dramatic in technikons, where the number of African students has increased by nearly 4 000 percent in 10 years. In all, student numbers in universities increased by 70 percent from 1985 to 1994, and by 184 percent in technikons.
The Race Relations Survey enabled the construction of a “league table” of universities in terms of progress made in enrolling students of all races. Historically, African universities have been excluded, since, with the exception of Medunsa, their numbers of non-African students are negligible.
Among the country’s 12 historically white, Indian and coloured universities, the formerly Indian University of Durban-Westville has made the greatest strides in enrolling African students. It has a student body which is 48 percent African, followed closely by the formerly coloured University of the Western Cape, where 47 percent of students are African.
At both, 47 percent of students are of the race group the university historically served: Indian and coloured respectively, and there are very few white students.
Among the historically white universities, Rand Afrikaans University — unexpectedly — now has the largest proportion of African students, followed in order by the Universities of Natal, the Witwatersrand, Rhodes and Cape Town.
The University of Stellenbosch has the lowest proportion of African students — only two percent — and, at 90 percent, the highest proportion of white students — while at the University of Pretoria, nine percent of students are African and at the University of the Orange Free State 10 percent.