The recent Council on Higher Education review to re-accredit MBA programmes across the higher education system — public and private — has been welcomed as ensuring the quality of a qualification so critical to high skills development in South Africa. Recent research by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) suggests that it is significant to understand the demand that private provision responds to and purports to meet, in order to engage with issues of quality in relation to national higher education goals.
The fact is that private provision has burgeoned in South Africa since the mid-1990s, and some students have chosen private provision, despite high fees. One form of private provider attracts students by claiming to meet a demand for education that is ‘better†than what the public sector can provide. Their qualifications promise mobility — whether in the sense of an internationally recognised and portable degree, or in the sense of a degree that is more oriented to the workplace and offers direct employability, and hence upward socio-economic mobility.
Most students attracted to these institutions come from formerly privileged and newly privileged homes, many from private schools. Many desire security and the individual attention that will virtually guarantee success, and which they perceive to be absent from public universities.
Some of these private providers are ‘transnationalâ€, with the home institution based in Australia or the United Kingdom, exemplifying the extension of a global education market to South Africa. The process of regulation has meant that ultimately, few transnational institutions are registered and accredited. Some of these providers operate in partnership with local public universities, most notably with distance institutions whose qualifications they offer alongside their own.
There is a strong potential for these institutions to be in competition with the public sector, in that they offer degrees in lucrative, low-cost fields, particularly business and commerce, and particularly the high-status MBA. They are owned by companies that have considerable investments and financial interests at stake.
And as the MBA review has found, some of these private providers offer creditworthy programmes, while others, along with their public peers, are found to offer quality that is seriously compromised. Regulation of these institutions to ensure that the quality of their degrees is equivalent to that offered in the public sector is critical.
However, there are a large number of small private institutions that do something very different, and have a greater potential to be complementary to the public sector. These private providers may have existed for many years, but now hold out the promise of offering recognised credentials that prepare students to be directly employable in specialised occupational niches. They primarily offer certificates and diplomas, to extend access to ‘non-traditional†students. It may be to those with educational barriers to entry to higher education, who lack matriculation exemption or who made subject choices that do not allow them to study further. It may be to those mature students who experienced racialised barriers to enter higher education in the past and now wish to obtain credentials to move up the occupational ranks. Or it may be to students who would not traditionally have entered particular occupations, given the job colour barriers of the past. And it may be to those with financial barriers to enter higher education, in that some of these institutions have relatively lower fees.
They offer occupationally oriented programmes in business and management, in new service industries such as tourism and leisure, media and entertainment, health and beauty, and there are a number of specialised religious institutions.
These private providers make a potentially significant contribution to developing skills at the intermediate level, a significant gap in the education and training system in South Africa. Such provision has the potential to contribute to a differentiated landscape by offering the kinds of specialised education and training that universities do not, the kinds of vocational, occupational and technical education and training that has suffered from low prestige and lack of status relative to the academic stream in South Africa.
On the supply side, these private institutions have read labour market signals to offer qualifications in these fields, and the students who choose these private providers perceive that such formal credentials will increase their employability. However, the impact on increased employability, in terms of providing quality credentials that will satisfy the actual demands of employers, is not yet proven.
The future challenge in engaging with this form of private provider is to coordinate the focus and quality of their provision to complement that offered in the career-oriented technikons and Further Education and Training colleges, and in terms of scarce intermediate skills needs in South Africa.
The HSRC analysis suggests that if we understand the differentiated demand for credentials or mobility that for-profit providers respond to, then it is possible to define terms of engagement that can harness private provision to operate in the social good, rather than the private interest.
Glenda Kruss is a chief research specialist in the research programme on human resources development at the Human Sciences Research Council and the author of Chasing Credentials and Mobility: Private Higher Education in South Africa, recently published by the HSRC Press