The row over extended doctors’ training is bringing pressure for other students to do community service.
Philippa Garson and Joshua Amupadhi report
Extending community service for postgraduates of all disciplines, including the medical profession, could help alleviate the funding crisis in tertiary education.
A furious debate developed this week around plans by the Interim National Medical Council to add a compulsory, two-year period of community service to the seven years’ training required for qualification as a doctor.
But the controversy has raised questions as to why the concept should be limited to doctors and to teachers — who have long repaid their training loans by state service. What of other professions like law and engineering?
While the state ploughs billions into tertiary education only a fraction is paid back in student fees — and only by some students. Given the crisis around university financing, many are asking whether the time has come for a more effective tertiary financing system that allows students to pay back the money it costs to educate them by doing community service in the public sector.
Wits University dean of health sciences Professor Max Price suggests a student-loan system whereby students pay back the bulk of their loans by service — as in the United States.
“The government should give them a loan to pay the entire cost and should then write this off in return for community service. This is not a dictatorial phenomenon. It’s done in most industrial countries.”
Such a scheme should apply to all professions, not just teachers and doctors. “It would make it clear that taxpayers are making a major investment in individuals’ education. The state and society is entitled to a return on that investment,” says Price.
Community service has been proposed by the National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE) as one way of paying back the state’s contribution towards their studies.
However, the concept has not been developed in any real way and the NCHE, whose final report is due this month, has not thus far come up with solutions to the funding crisis in the tertiary sector.
John Gear, director of the Wits Rural Facility, backs the idea of incentive-driven rather than compulsory community service. “If it is compulsion- driven as opposed to incentive-driven the consequences are resistance, resentment and inferior services,” he says.
But in some fields, the idea of community service still meets with resistance. Wits University engineering professor Hu Hanrahan said he doubted whether sufficient job opportunities for engineering community service existed in the state. “I don’t think community service is as practical in engineering as it is in the health service. It will siphon the engineers out of the market and that will impact on the GDP,” he said.
While the notion is popular in some law faculties which point to the need for legal services in rural areas, practical steps at introducing community service have yet to be taken.
But the idea of voluntary service is now taking root on campuses, says Professor Christof Heyns, acting director of Pretoria University’s Centre for Human Rights. Heyns helped found the Southern African Student Volunteers three years ago, an organisation based on 22 university and technikon campuses which sends students during holidays to needy areas to help upgrade schools and clinics.
“We get seven times more applications than we can access. It’s definitely becoming more popular.” But Heyns says black students are far keener on the programmes than their white counterparts who make up only 10% of the volunteer force.
The South African Students’ Congress backs the idea of community service, which “augurs well with the spirit of nation-building enshrined in the RDP”, says deputy secretary general Kenny Diseko. “We are in support of such a policy because it balances the notion of the brain drain. Some people are selfish. Students should feel obliged to do community service as a contribution to the country.”
ANC Youth League general secretary Febe Potgieter says her organisation supports the idea of youth service programmes in tertiary institutions.
“There is a need to see that everyone with state assistance must give something back.” The National Youth Commission returned recently from a trip to the United States armed with new ideas on implementing community service.