David Robbins
The central premise in the size and shape debate is that the apartheid inheritance has caused distortions in tertiary education that now need correcting. The size of the sector – in student numbers – and the shape of it – the types of institutions it contains, and the proportion of universities to technikons – are not necessarily what the country requires.
Minister of Education Kadar Asmal has been talking about his intention to ”review the institutional landscape” and ”to take the necessary action with all deliberate speed” – a statement which has caused prolonged rumbles of speculation and heightened competition, among universities in particular.
Writing in the latest Quarterly Review of Education and Training, George Subotzky of the education policy unit at the University of the Western Cape sums up the situation.
”The urgency of the minister’s intention to take action is motivated by understandable concerns for the efficiency, effectiveness and equity of the system. Inefficiency runs deep, with wasteful institutional and programmatic duplications, numerous instances of poor quality and unsatisfactory success rates, and lack of adequate financial management. The current shape and size of the system continues to reduce the effectiveness of higher education in meeting societal needs.”
One way to understand the impact of the apartheid inheritance on tertiary education is to point out its similarity to railway bridges. Remember the days when we used to have bridges for whites, and identical bridges for those who weren’t white? The purpose of all the bridges was the same: to get people to the other side of the tracks. When everyone began using all the bridges, the obvious issues became: do we have too many bridges for the basic purpose? Or will increasing passenger volumes at railway stations ultimately justify all the bridges?
Although the tertiary education system is a good deal more complex than this analogy allows, the questions of duplication and volume are fundamental. Duplication is relatively straightforward and has already been addressed at institutional and (to a lesser extent so far) regional level. Natal University, for example, has rationalised away much of the departmental duplication that existed across its Durban and Pietermaritzburg campuses. And in Cape Town and Johannesburg, institutions are trying to not duplicate the programmes offered by others, seeking instead more co-operative arrangements with their neighbours.
But it’s not all sweetness and light, as the following comment illustrates: ”There’s talk of Medunsa merging with the medical school at Pretoria. But why disadvantage Medunsa in this way? Is it because we’re supposed to be used to being disadvantaged?
”We’re in competition with Pretoria, but the authorities don’t seem capable of recognising our requirements. We’re in desperate need of more training hospital beds, for example, but additional beds are going to Pretoria instead. We’ve got a top- class neurosurgery unit here, but so has Pretoria. Guess who’ll lose their unit?”
The numbers issue is equally charged. The urgent need here is to establish whether the current level of 520 000 tertiary students will be enough to satisfy the professional and technological demands of the country, and what proportions should be maintained between technikon and university education.
When the experts sat down earlier this decade to produce the White Paper on Higher Education, steadily or even dramatically increasing student numbers was taken as inevitable. Contrary to this assumption, though, the university sector has been shrinking since 1996, and now even the technikons as a group have stopped growing.
Some voices within the debate argue that this shrinkage is a temporary trend. Student populations will once more increase as soon as the number of potential students emerging from the school system increases. Or have we already got as many students as we need?
Probably not. International trends with regard to the numbers of tertiary-trained students are illustrated by the experience of Japan, where nearly 90% of school- leavers do post-school education. Considerably less than 20% of these students go to a university, however; the remainder do job-related and largely technical courses. If we are to follow international trends however, then we need vigorous student growth to stay afloat in the next century.
But nobody is ready yet to say exactly how much growth. This lack of information is illustrative of one of the most harmful yet usually hidden legacies of the apartheid era. When a country is running on ideological fuel, ”real” statistics and data banks of vital information are rarely its priority.
Now, the departments of education and labour are working to counteract this deficiency. But so far information about the economy and its manpower needs, about socio-economic development in all its myriad spheres, and not least about the output and replenishment of the higher education sector itself, seems not to be refined enough to provide a definitive answer.
Nevertheless, the debate continues. What is obvious is that the old duplications brought about by separate development are wasteful. A differentiated approach – which means a number of different kinds of institutions rather than a combination of undiluted universities and full-scale technikons – seems a better bet than crude closures and mergers and so-called downgrades.
In practice, differentiation means that each institution should find its niche rather than all institutions striving for identical goals; and also that they should work in a co-operative way with other institutions, seeking to serve the needs of their region and the country as a whole, rather than their own.
Yet that central ingredient, the optimum size of the tertiary education effort, is still lacking. This means that while many institutions are trying to reshape themselves, they appear to be doing so according to a template the actual dimensions of which they haven’t yet seen.
It’s no wonder, as the sector waits for clear leads from the minister and his department, that the individual survival of institutions and the competition between them have become the size-and-shape debate’s most important subtexts.