Students who fail perpetually should not be allowed to continue their higher education studies indeterminately, Minister of Education Naledi Pandor said on Friday.
Higher-education institutions should carefully reconsider their readmission criteria, she told reporters in Pretoria.
”The ministry cannot condone the continued enrolment of students who demonstrate no progress whatsoever in their studies. This is not in the interests of the students, nor of the system. I hope no South African will find that unacceptable.”
The minister rejected claims that she intends prohibiting the readmission of students who fail their first year of study, and sought to explain a draft proposal she has submitted to the higher-education sector for consideration.
”Essentially, the proposal seeks to develop approaches that do not cause the opening of the doors of learning to become traps in an ever-revolving door of failure and despair.”
There should be a change in focus, she said, from merely filling university lecture halls to ensuring quality students with qualifications worth the paper on which they are written.
Pandor said the government lost about R4,5-billion in subsidies to higher-education institutions because of student drop-outs between 2000 and 2003.
This amounted to about half of the actual subsidies paid. Higher-education institutions receive a subsidy for every student enrolled.
About 30% of students enrolled at the beginning of 2000 had dropped out by the end of that year, and another 20% by the end of 2002.
Of the remaining 50%, less than half graduated within the intended three years.
Equity of access and transformation
Pandor repeated her department’s commitment to promoting equity of access and transformation in higher education.
To this end, the government has funded academic support programmes and the national student financial aid scheme, and adopted a new funding formula to support those institutions boosting their success rates.
Her proposal to the sector, the minister said, seeks to address a number of ”troubling features”.
This includes that increased access has not been accompanied by strategies to ensure improvements in quality.
”Growth in higher education has been driven primarily by institutional interests and not by sectoral or national deliberations and plans.”
Also, enrolment growth has been unplanned, unrelated to available funding and detached from available physical and personnel resources.
”The absence of planning has exacerbated the quality problems, including high drop-out rates,” Pandor said.
To this end, she has proposed that institutions focus more on improving graduation and success rates by better managing new intakes and readmissions.
The system should respond and contribute to national human resource requirements, especially in scarce skills fields such as teacher education, science, engineering and technology.
”Enrolments should be matched to available resources to enable the higher-education system to deliver on its teaching and research mandate,” the minister said.
She said the proposal ”does not depart in any way from my commitment to examine and most probably improve the overall level of funding to the system”.
While subsidy levels for higher education have been somewhat ”squeezed” and need to be reconsidered, much of the sector’s problems are self-inflicted, Pandor said.
In all debates on the topic, the consensus appears to be ”more money”, while the focus should be on improving outputs, the minister said.
She cited the example of a student who had been studying for three years without achieving a single credit.
”I am being depicted as the devil here. In my opinion, these children are being denied an opportunity,” she said.
University vice-chancellors have undertaken to respond to the proposal early next week, the minister added. — Sapa