How can higher education policies be shaped to support Nepad, asks Richard A Fehnel
Two recent news items cause one to ask whether South African higher education is missing “the big picture” which, from one perspective, is how to deal with the future of Africa.
African leaders came to an agreement last year that the future will be shaped by widespread commitment to a strategy of New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad). A key element of that strategy is building the capacity of the African economy, through regional trade, in order to engage more successfully in the global economy. Building this capacity will require years of investment in human resource development (education and health), technology adaptation to meet local needs, and development of the political and physical infrastructure of countries in order to manage development efforts and get goods delivered safely and promptly to the right destinations.
One of the two recent news articles is “Awe and unease as South Africa stretches out” (New York Times, February 17). The other is “Storms gather over tertiary mergers” (Mail & Guardian, February 13). The first clearly deals with the big picture and outlines a challenge to South Africa: get your act together before you really become an African version of the Ugly American an ignorant, swaggering, economic and military bully, feared and hated by those who cannot avoid having to deal with you.
The New York Times article cites examples of ignorance in two important ways: a lack of knowledge of local conditions, leading to high-risk business choices, such as Anglo’s misadventure into Zambian copper mines; and a lack of sensitivity to local interests, such as South African Breweries’s moves into the Kenyan brewery industry. This ignorance is explained away by South Africa’s isolation during the years of apartheid.
The second item raises a fundamental question that the nation’s political leadership needs to deal with: how can South Africa’s higher education sector be made a more effective partner with other government and private sector initiatives to promote Nepad? At present, some observers and stakeholders in higher education feel that higher education policies on the cards, as well as some of those implemented in the last two years, threaten to undercut Nepad-oriented programmes.
Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. Napoleon and Hitler both lost in Russia because they extended themselves beyond the limits of their supply lines. The South African economic expansionists, on whom the economic future of the continent may depend in the Nepad scenario, are about to run into the end of their human resources supply lines. Not only are South Africa universities and technikons struggling to produce the right blend of human resources to meet local needs, the country is having a hard time keeping them since foreign head-hunters keep picking off both the experienced managers as well as new graduates who have doubts about building careers at home.
Now, add to this the human resource requirements needed to operate more than a billion dollars worth of investments by South African businesses in the rest of Africa in less than a decade an investment that must, of necessity, grow if Nepad is to be successful. And add to this the realisation that all the other sub-Saharan universities and polytechnics and teacher training colleges combined produce only twice what South Africa’s higher education system produces.
This should lead to the understanding that South African businesses, as many have already learned, cannot depend on the labour markets nor the universities in the African countries in which they operate to supply the technical and management skills they need. They need to bring their own supply with them which brings us back to the issue of whether South Africa’s higher education system is being “sized and shaped” in a way to face these challenges.
The report of the minister of education’s National Working Group (NWG), released in February, recommends actions that would cut South Africa’s higher education productive capacity. It recommends reducing the current number of public universities by more than 50% from 21 to 10 and reducing the current number of technikons from 15 to eight. It recommends eliminating the colleges of nursing and agriculture by merging the few that remain into the reshaped universities and technikons. While it would maintain most of the current sites, it would staff and manage these differently. In effect, the NWG recommended a “hostile takeover” of most campuses through coercive mergers.
There is no doubt that a basic concern of the NWG was to find a solution to the fiscal concerns facing the higher education sector for the past decade or more. This is evidenced by their concern for improving the efficiency of the system. However, as a report from the South African Universities Vice-Chancellors Association indicated, there are other approaches to achieving these goals than the drastic measures recommended. Nor is it clear how the actions recommended will improve efficiency. If most of the campuses will continue to operate, but with signs in the window that say “Under New Management”, how will that change efficiency? If some campuses or programmes are closed, it will lead to an increase in the average class size. There is no evidence in international literature indicating that increases in class size, and compressing a greater diversity of students into smaller “academic space”, produces a higher throughput rate. A major concern of the Department of Education is the 25% dropout rate that occurs each year across the public higher education system, at a reported cost of more than US$160-million.
On the other hand, we cannot escape the reality that the institutions the NWG would eliminate simply are not productive. However, eliminating them creates a whole new set of issues, not the least of which is that this solution does not address the issue of how other branches of government will find the human resources to manage the effective and efficient delivery of social services and job-creating programmes. Nor does the NWG report address the very real issue of the financial cost of coercive mergers costs that may exceed more than R1-billion. Costs at that level have not been budgeted by the Ministry of Education.
So the basic question that needs to be asked is: how can South Africa’s higher education system be reshaped and refinanced to handle the country’s needs and the continent’s human resource needs to implement Nepad?
How can more resources be brought into the system? In Malaysia, for example, the government has begun a process of “corporatising” all its public universities a move that retains aspects of their public character, but gives the institutions significantly more latitude in generating additional income and attracting better staff.
Secondly, the government needs to work with rather than against the private higher education sector. One important factor that enabled the Asian tigers to become what they are was getting the private sector to finance higher education. Thirdly, there needs to be an increase in the number of students who can pay their fees. This can be done in two ways: by increasing the number of working adults served by higher education, since in most cases their fees are paid by their employers; and by redirecting a significant portion of under-utilised capacity in the system to serve the unmet human resources needs of the rest of Sub-Sahara Africa. Already Botswana sends more than 4 000 students a year to South Africa, and more than 10% of these are in private higher education providers.
Thinking creatively about this last option is important; not just more of the same. The University of Maastricht has established “University College” a special learning unit that caters to a combination of Dutch and international students. It is one of the more innovative higher education ventures around.
Building on this idea, imagine a comprehensive Nepad Fellows programme focusing on two types of learners undergraduate and graduate students, and professionals and technical people from industry, government, education and civil society. Imagine a Nepad university college in every major South Africa city Bloemfontein, Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg, Pietermaritzburg, Port Elizabeth, Pretoria with 2 000 to 4 000 full-time equivalent enrolments per year in each of these facilities. Imagine the academic programmes being coordinated by existing regional higher education consortia, drawing on the best academic staff from all the institutions, not just those in the cities.
Now imagine satellite campuses of these Nepad university colleges in the capital cities of other African countries, with staff provided by partnerships of South African public and private higher education providers. Nepad satellite university colleges would serve the working adults in those markets the employees of the firms, public corporations and government agencies with which South Africa’s businesses are working, employees such as engineers, bankers, telecommunications technicians, allied health workers, teachers, and so on.
Such an ambitious programme would address a number of critical issues. It would set in motion a system of partnerships that could address short, medium and long-term capacity-building issues in terms of human resource needs. It would increase the supply of fees-paying learners, and with effective coordination, increase the efficiency of all institutions. The implementation of partnerships would assist institutions in South Africa and other countries build their capacity to manage operations, and equally importantly, nurture the development of a culture of entrepreneurship that could address long-term financial needs.
Who would pay for this? Partnerships of governments, private sector and international donors economic and government alliances in Nepad that stand to benefit from an effective human resource production operation. Corporatised South African institutions would see opportunities for gain, as would re-energised private providers. Such an approach would give all institutions an opportunity to develop their capacity around a more robust notion of “fitness for purpose” than that used by the NWG.
A programme of this nature and scope would help to create and strengthen an appropriately Afrocentric character of research and instructional activities. It would build the foundation of interpersonal relations among learners in the university college campuses in South Africa and throughout the continent that would lead to greater economic and political intercourse and help to create and sustain a framework of mutual understanding needed on the continent.
Rather than demoralising and risking the destruction of South Africa’s continental asset its higher education system as the NWG recommendations do, such an approach would bring new energy, new resources and a new sense of purpose to the sector, and make it a viable and important element in the government’s Nepad operations.
Dr Richard Fehnel is one of the editors of The Transformation of Higher Education: Global Pressures and Local Realities in South Africa, a book analysing higher education policy since 1994, published last month by Juta. Fehnel has also written a chapter on approaches to massification of higher education in Africa in a book edited by Philip Altbach and Damtew Teferra that will be published by Indiana University Press later this year. Before retiring last year, Fehnel was the acting representative of the Ford Foundation in Southern Africa and served as education programme officer of the foundation for seven years