Philippa Garson reports on mixed reactions to the proposed new higher education system
MANY academics blanch at the discourse of today’s education policy-makers, who talk of multiple exit and entry points, ladders, frameworks and flexibility — descriptions of “pathways of learning” that seem to bear closer resemblance to complex obstacle courses than the hallowed process of learning and teaching.
No wonder the engineering academics embrace the new concepts with such enthusiasm: visions of a dizzy highway of teaching and learning pose yet more challenges for complicated sums around structures and balance.
The same can’t be said of the philosophers and theoreticians, who can think of nothing worse than imposing a shape — a framework of evaluation, of exit and entry levels — on their lectures about the infinity of meaning.
The National Commission on Higher Education proposes a highly flexible system that pulls as many people as possible into it, with a uniform minimum-entry requirement, and that allows for mobility within the system.
It proposes that “a Single Qualification Framework be developed for all higher education qualifications as part of the National Qualifications Framework (NQF)”.
For many academics and academic institutions, the commission’s hearty embrace of this new vision is problematic. For the pessimists and traditionalists, it signals a drop in standards, a loss of autonomy and, perhaps worse, a loss of identity.
But it is not difficult to see why the commission endorses so strongly a mass-based higher education system of the kind being introduced by most European countries, the United States and Australia.
The lack of structure and co-ordination of our present system has resulted in a shortage of graduates and acute shortages in the science and technology fields. Years of isolation, protective tarrifs and the academic boycott have had a “negative impact on the quality of skills from artisan to academic,” says commissioner Rahmat Omar.
Underpinning the commission’s starting point is the acknowledgement that “massification” of the system is crucial if both economic and political demands are to be satisfied. Currently the system caters for 54% of the white youth, but only 6% of the African youth. To compete economically, South Africa has no choice but to follow the mass education route of most industrialised countries.
The challenge, says the commission, is to bring students of all ages into the system, introduce uniform statutory minimum-entrance requirements, increase mobility for students in the system and broaden the pool of students eligible for higher education.
Elaborating on its proposal that all higher education qualifications be brought under the South African Qualifications Authority, the commission proposes that the BA degree becomes a four-year course, that honours is done away with, that a two-year general university diploma be introduced, and that masters degrees be restructured as two-year programmes with an advanced diploma exit qualification after one year.
“We are looking at equivalence, not similarity, to assist mobility. This does not mean that all BA degrees must be the same, but they must be equivalent in terms of the NQF,” says commission executive director Teboho Moja.
But changes like these will undoubtedly be perceived as radical and shocking in institutions where resistance to tampering with academic tradition is strong. It is not so much that universities are opposed to flexible entrance requirements; it is the perceived loss of control over who they admit and what they teach.
The Committee of University Principals (CUP) moved to get higher education institutions excluded from the new education legislation passed in November, since not enough research had been conducted on the issue. Neither the CUP nor universities like the University of Cape Town, which has been known to oppose the NQF extending to its sector, have yet formulated their responses to the commission and would not make premature comments to the Mail & Guardian. They will do so at a crucial meeting early in June.
But the commission is well aware of the “mixed reaction” to the NQF by academics both here and abroad. In fact, Moja acknowledges that while other countries have endorsed frameworks like the NQF, they have yet to do so successfully in the area of higher education. “If we succeed, we’ll be the first to do so,” says Moja.