The recent protests at the University of the Witwatersrand are a harbinger for all of us. While the reshaping of higher education is vital, aspects like financial aid need rethinking.
Here’s why: most of the 70 000 students who are able to attend higher-education institutions every year need financial assistance.
By allocating R545-million to loans and bursaries through vehicles like the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS), the government enables many of these students to afford a tertiary qualification. The NSFAS is a good vehicle to assist many of the academically deserving and economically needy students.
The aid scheme is not a free ride, however. It encourages the economically needy student to demonstrate and secure the loan through performance — and herein lies the rub.
To receive the support, the student applies for loan, which the admitting institution processes — relying on a means test and the performance of the student.
Should the student pass all of his or her courses that year, 40% of the loan is converted into a bursary, leaving the student only 60% to repay at a reduced interest rate once he or she finds employment. By all accounts the NSFAS is a good plan to assist needy, yet capable, students.
The scheme significantly reduces its risk exposure by being able to collect on the loan through deducting the repayments directly from the candidate’s salary once the student has successfully completed a programme of study and begins to earn an income.
But by only paying out loans on the basis of the student’s achievement assessed at the end of the year, regardless of the student’s financial burden, the scheme transfers any additional (if not all) risk to the admitting institutions. It also means that universities have to carry the can when problems arise — as Wits University did last week and others will do in the future.
NSFAS loans can be as small as R2 000 and as large as R25 000 a year, and each institution receives a predetermined allocation, which — although it can differ from year to year — is usually not increased once allocated. For example, although a student may need and apply for a loan for R13 500 for the year, the scheme will, at the end of that year, only credit the student for the courses he or she was successful in and not the total loan.
Consequently the same student can end up receiving a loan of only R3 500 should he or she not pass all courses taken that year. This effectively transfers the R10 000 debt incurred for the year to the admitting institution without the concomitant remedies to enable the institution to recover the debt — because universities do not have the regulatory muscle to attach the student’s assets or directly deduct payments from the student’s salary once her or she is employed. Because of the raison d’être of transformation (to make tertiary education accessible to more students) and our immediate past, institutions do not have a real right to refuse a student admission on the basis of financial need, effectively forcing these organisations into taking on a high financial risk.
Furthermore, many disadvantaged students land on the institutions’ doorsteps poorly prepared for university study and can take considerably longer to complete their qualifications. This escalates the costs of a university qualification exponentially — because every additional year the student is enrolled increases his or her debt.
Hence disadvantaged students owe hundreds of millions of rands to higher-education institutions across the country, necessitating government bail-outs of these eventually bankrupt institutions.
Notwithstanding this, many institutions attend to these students with great empathy, recognising that a university qualification is one of the ways out of the vicious cycle of poverty.
Amid competing demands on continuously shrinking resources, the government and higher-education institutions have demonstrated great commitment to education and have dug deep to ensure they provide the support our students’ need to gain tertiary qualifications.
However, no amount of financial support will make a difference if these students do not roll up their sleeves and attend to their studies with an unwavering commitment and seriousness.
Unless South Africa’s learners become real partners in ensuring their success at our institutions, there is no hope of saving any of us from the poverty of knowledge and resources we seem headed for.
Edwin Smith is the director of the University of Pretoria’s Mamelodi campus