The new higher education plan has drawn broadly positive responses for the urgency with which it addresses serial crises
David Macfarlane
South Africa’s need for graduates has risen by a staggering 2 000% over the past three decades, but the current system of higher education cannot rise to this challenge.
This is the scale of the problem that the government’s National Plan for Higher Education, unveiled this week, sets out to confront. Launching the plan, Minister of Education Kader Asmal declared that its “implementation will begin immediately”. The plan is “not up for further consultation and certainly not for negotiation … I will relentlessly and inexorably drive the implementation process,” he said.
The product of 10 years’ policy debate and consultation, the wide-ranging plan installs comprehensive government mechanisms of control and regulation. It repeatedly stresses that the government intends to use the most potent instrument at its disposal funding to ensure institutions comply with “the national interest”.
“I expect [higher education constituencies] to set aside their self-interest, individual institutional interests and regional interests for the sake of the system as a whole,” said Asmal, “and ultimately the country and its future in Africa and the global community.”
An early indication that implementing parts of this plan could involve serious conflict is that Vista University the only black university the plan explicitly refers to has already bitten back.
The national plan dictates that Vista University, with its seven satellite campuses in three provinces, be “unbundled”.
“Vista will no longer exist,” said a senior government official. “The question is not whether but how” these campuses will be merged with other nearby institutions.
A senior Vista academic speculates that the plan specifies Vista because it is a relatively soft target: “It has no political record worth preserving and no political clout,” he said, “whereas touching other black universities is touching our national heritage.”
But Vista claims that the Ministry of Education has acted on “misinformation”. Accurate enrolment figures “contradict the summary provided in the national plan justifying the unbundling of the Vista contact campuses”, university senior management says. “Vista will be making a counter-proposal shortly.”
The plan has drawn broadly positive responses for the urgency with which it addresses serial crises in higher education, and for several of its specific responses to last year’s Council on Higher Education (CHE) recommendations. The CHE proposed that most institutions should offer undergraduate programmes only, with “a limited number of Oxfords” (as CHE task team member Professor Wiseman Nkuhlu put it) as postgraduate and research centres of excellence.
The national plan rejects this, requiring rather that institutions identify and develop their existing teaching and research strengths. The South African Universities Vice-Chancellors Association expresses its “strong support” for this key recommendation.
On the future of historically black universities, the plan accepts the CHE recommendation to reduce the overall number of institutions but adopts a politically more cautious approach. Where the CHE drew fire for the specific institutional combinations it suggested, the national plan refers the entire issue to a national working group that will report back by the end of the year.
The plan does not specify who will constitute this working group and “this will be critical”, says Professor George Subotsky, director of the University of the Western Cape’s education policy unit.
But criticism focuses on the extent to which the National Plan for Higher Education is actually a plan of action, as opposed to a recital of policies rehearsed for several years. “It is just a restatement of the 1997 Education White Paper,” says Professor Jonathan Jansen, dean of education at Pretoria University, “with a few planning strokes thrown in.”
The plan does take us back to the White Paper, says Subotsky, but it also takes us forward though “it is not a comprehensive plan of action … It lacks a formal, built-in review plan for its various targets, which you expect to have in a planning document.”
Both Jansen and Subotsky comment on the plan’s inadequate consideration of HIV/Aids in relation to its long-term aim of increasing student numbers. “This is absolutely critical to any planning process,” says Subotsky. I am surprised it is not more prominent in the plan.”
The merging of Unisa, Technikon South Africa and Vista’s distance education centre has evoked puzzlement among some. “Where in practice is the overlap that the plan refers to among the programmes the three offer?” asks an educationist. But Unisa is “delighted … It is well within Unisa’s capabi-lities to serve upwards of 200?000 students. This seal of approval by the ministry has renewed staffers’ optimism for the future of Unisa,” says vice-chancellor Professor Antony Melck.
However, Vista is investigating whether “correct institutional procedures”, in terms of an agreement reached last year about a merger, have been followed.
The rocky relationship between the government and private education looks set to continue, with especially heavy controls on this sector in the offing. Current registration and accreditation processes, which have already angered private providers, are inadequate and should be “strengthened”, says the plan, and new regulations are due to be gazetted in July.
Sources in private education welcome the plan’s acknowledgement that the private sector has a national role to play, but fear that further stringent regulations could lead to an overburdening of the sector with controls. They are also “dumbfounded” at the plan’s repeated references to “unfair competition” between private and public institutions: “What is unfair about competition, especially when private institutions receive no taxpayers’ money?”
Increased controls on partnerships between private and public institutions which universities such as Pretoria, Stellenbosch, Rand Afrikaans and Potchefstroom have implemented for years have received sceptical responses. “Such partnerships are the one mechanism that explains the growth in black enrolments in higher education,” says Jansen, “and could actually help the government fulfil its enrolment targets. So why the clampdown?”
Asmal stressed at Monday’s launch that the plan “carries unprecedented political support” and has the “full support and endorsement” of the Cabinet. Early indications are that he will need this in full measure as the practical implications of implementing the national plan unfold in the coming months.