Tertiary institutions last month received government notice of drastic alterations to their teaching programmes that will 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 – 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,” says Jonathan Jansen, dean of education at the University of Pretoria, “with an impact potentially more devastating than mergers.” A three-month comment period on merger proposals released earlier this year that seeks to reduce the number of tertiary institutions to 21 is currently under way.
Last month’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 a 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 programmes go, and Technikon Witwatersrand 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. “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 was 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.
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 weaker institutions the principle is: build on what you have.”