What kind of higher education system do we want, and what is actually emerging? These are surely the fundamental questions beneath the noise engendered by the government’s intention to cap student enrolment numbers at all tertiary institutions, starting from next year.
An equally urgent question concerns who speaks for higher education. Since the 1997 White Paper, the conversation has seemed remarkably one-sided, with the state increasingly tightening its grip on a sector marked by often uncertain and fragmented leadership.
The White Paper turned its back on the earlier priority of ”massification”, as proposed by the National Commission on Higher Education in 1996. The latest capping proposals are the outcome of that policy reversal. In December 2003 the Ministry of Education announced its intention to get down to the nuts and bolts of ”a system-wide student enrolment planning exercise”, and did so last year.
The department’s case is that there is not enough funding to -sustain the unexpectedly large increase in student enrolments since 2000; and ”inefficiencies in the system” have led to high drop-out and low -graduation rates.
Despite the long gestation of this year’s capping fracas, higher education leadership has been scrappily uncoordinated in engaging with the state. As a result, the state’s progress towards an increasingly market-related and fiscally driven conception of higher education has been relatively unimpeded.
There are now at least some signs that this could change. Last week -tertiary leaders delivered their response to the capping proposals to Minister of Education Naledi Pandor. Higher Education South Africa (Hesa) seriously questions the adequacy of the department’s proposals and reasoning, and in the process speaks with a more cogent and unified voice than has come from the sector in many years. Hesa came into being two weeks ago from the union of the South African Universities Vice-Chancellors Association and the Committee of Technikon Principals.
”It is our contention that implementation [of the capping plan] in its current form and without a number of other interventions will be damaging to the higher education system,” said newly elected Hesa chairperson Professor Barney Pityana. He called on the department to discuss alternative strategies with the sector.
That is a firm rejection of the proposals. Hesa is also ”seriously concerned” about low throughput rates, Pityana said, but the proposed measures by themselves will not address this problem.
Hesa argues that higher education is ”seriously under-capitalised”, and questions how ”opportune” the capping proposals are in the light of the joint education department and Treasury investigation into tertiary funding.
But the most politically explosive implication of the capping concerns exclusions from higher education in ”diminish[ing] opportunities for school leavers even further” … ”Bottling up” the system, as Hesa describes the effect of capping, will lead to a ”crisis of expectations” that higher education institutions cannot be expected to manage themselves.
And who would be excluded? The department is silent on this, preferring the language of fiscal necessity. Hesa doesn’t speculate on the likely targets of exclusions, yet it seems clear that institutions would have to enrol mainly those with a better chance of passing in the shortest possible time, and this would have to mean applicants from advantaged backgrounds.
The Hesa document’s nervousness about managing the consequences of institutions excluding mainly poor and mainly black students is well-founded, given upheavals last year and this on several campuses around exactly this issue.
Most powerfully, Hesa draws attention to a fact that the government doesn’t confront in its capping document as a major reason for low success rates at universities — the quality of schooling. There are ”significant problems inherited at first-year level in subject content as well as literacy and numeracy competencies crucial for successful university education”.
And drop-out rates are affected, Hesa argues, by factors such as financial ability, lack of career guidance and advice, and the impact of HIV/Aids, among other things.
It does seem extraordinary that the department can ascribe drop-out rates and poor graduation statistics purely to ”inefficiencies” in higher education. This is a good example of what Hesa CEO Piyushi Kotecha called earlier this year ”high-level discontinuity … a lack of joined-up strategy between all the stakeholders”.
Another example might well involve the argument Pandor has often made that school leavers have opportunities open to them other than universities and technikons. Principally, she has massively promoted the development of further education and training (FET) colleges, saying students need to be pointed there rather than only to tertiary institutions.
She has used this argument to justify her rejection of the view that tertiary exclusions signify the doors of learning are closing. Not so, the minister has said, the choices for post-school education have never been more diverse than now.
There is clearly a gulf here between her and Hesa, which says ”alternative FET opportunities” are narrowing. An additional question, with Kotecha’s argument about ”high-level discontinuity” in mind, is how ”joined up” policies on higher education and FET colleges are.
The higher education system now clearly emerging looks very elite and narrow, and market considerations have seriously demoted the priority of widening access to the tertiary level.
But Hesa now has a chance of -demonstrating what clout higher education might have if it can engage with the state in a more unified and coherent way than tertiary leadership has traditionally displayed. Access might not yet be a forgotten remnant of our history.