Tertiary institutions this week received government notice of drastic alterations to their teaching programmes, to kick in from next year.
Historically disadvantaged institutions (HDIs) and technikons bear the main brunt of the changes, with consequences one prominent educationist considers potentially “more devastating than mergers”.
The Ministry of Education’s Approved Academic Programmes for Universities and Technikon: 2003 to 2006 prescribes which programmes each of the country’s 36 tertiary institutions can continue to offer from next year and which ones each must drop.
The major change is that HDIs and technikons will lose a large number of their postgraduate programmes. Universities lose almost all their undergraduate diplomas. From next year only programmes the ministry has approved will qualify for government funding.
“This document internally reorganises the identity of institutions with an impact potentially more devastating than mergers,” says Professor Jonathan Jansen, dean of education at the University of Pretoria.
A three-month comment period is under way on merger proposals released earlier this year that seek to reduce the number of tertiary institutions to 21.
This week’s academic programme directive from the education ministry “hits HDIs the hardest in terms of their curriculum identities”, Jansen says. “Scholars will leave institutions that offer few or no postgraduate programmes.”
The University of the North and the University of Venda see an especially large number of their postgraduate programmes disappear — 19 from the North, 20 from Venda. Fort Hare loses 15 postgraduate programmes and the University of the North West 18. Technikon Pretoria sees 13 of its postgraduate programmes go, and Technikon Witwatersrand loses 17.
The universities of Cape Town, Stellenbosch and Pretoria retain all their postgraduate programmes, while Wits, Natal and Rand Afrikaans University lose three apiece. Rhodes University loses one doctoral programme, and the University of Port Elizabeth six.
“We have not taken away viable programmes,” says Ahmed Essop, chief director for higher education in the national Department of Education. “Given the historical context, it’s not surprising that HDIs and some technikons are most affected. Institutions have to demonstrate capacity and staff resources for particular programmes they want to offer.”
The ministry’s document says the reorganisation is aimed at creating “a baseline to determine a more rational allocation of programmes in future linked to the restructuring of the institutional landscape of higher education and national and regional human resource needs …
“Approval to offer postgraduate programmes was withdrawn when there were no enrolments recorded by institutions in 2000 [the first full year for which appropriate data were available],” the document says.
Other criteria included graduation rates, qualified academic supervisors and whether a neighbouring institution offered a particular qualification, “so that students in a region were not disadvantaged”.
The ministry has also withdrawn approval in cases where “programmes were not appropriate to the mission of the institution” — literary studies in technikons or home economics at universities, for example.
“Not merely to strengthen the strong and further weaken the weak is a major policy problem,” says Professor George Subotzky, director of the University of the Western Cape’s Education Policy Unit. “It is sensible to operate on the principle of consolidating areas of strength, but the danger lies in a multiplier effect for HDIs. Retention of good staff is crucial for research, for example.”
Essop says this is “a first stab at the process, which has been intensive and complicated and does need refinement. The document is not cast in stone. Institutions can come back to us to reactivate programmes, for example. For weaker institutions the principle is: build on what you have.”