In a move that is likely to spark controversy, the government looks set to promote a two-tier system of higher education, with some universities selected for growth and additional funding.
In the process, the Department of Education has revised its hotly contested 2004 proposals for capping student enrolments at all universities on grounds of low graduation and high dropout rates. Universities were required to submit enrolment plans for 2007 to 2009. These plans have led to discussions in the past month between the department and the institutions.
Based on recent meetings between the department and university authorities, academics speculate that universities earmarked for growth include at least the ”big five” — Wits, Stellenbosch, Pretoria, Rhodes and Cape Town.
The academics see this as a clear revision of the policy set out in the 2001 National Plan for Higher Education, which insisted that all universities, including historically disadvantaged institutions, would receive similar treatment.
Acting deputy general Molapo Qhobela confirmed the emergence of ”a differentiated approach to planning … to allow growth in institutions that meet specific criteria … Meetings with individual institutions [recently] have essentially enacted this ‘differentiated approach’.”
He declined to name universities, but said ”individual institutions’ contributions to developmental needs are not necessarily limited to their historical strengths … It is certainly not the intention of the department to stifle future growth nor to privilege some institutions above others.”
Qhobela added: ”Some universities have indicated that they need not growth but consolidation. Others have said, ‘we could grow’, to which the department has replied, ‘Give us a what if, what would you need? For example, where would any new money go?’
”The intention behind this approach is to reach agreements or compacts with individual institutions on the weighting of their student and staff numbers in relation to their institutional carrying capacities and contributions to national development needs.”
The latter include scarce skills fields such as teacher education and science, engineering and technology, in line with the government’s Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa and the Joint Initiative for Priority Skills Acquisition .
Qhobela did not specify which universities would receive additional funding. He said the department’s approach was informed by advice from the vice- chancellors’ organisation, Higher Education South Africa, and from the independent Council for Higher Education (CHE) that ”enrolment planning should be aligned more closely to the country’s human resource development requirements”, and should be introduced over a longer period.
In 2000, the CHE ”shape and size” report recommended not only mergers but a differentiated system, with universities distinguished by the extent of their postgraduate resources and research capacities. Some institutions would offer undergraduate courses only, while the cream would offer the full range, including high-quality research programmes.
Faced with intense political opposition, on the grounds that this would reproduce an apartheid system of institutional privilege and deprivation, the government’s 2001 National Plan for Higher Education accepted mergers but without differentiating institutional types.
The department’s recent discussions with universities look like a return to the CHE principles, said Peter Vale, professor of politics at Rhodes University. ”Higher education has to produce quality graduates — and quickly. We must go for growth now in the system, and targeting the top universities acknowledges the reality of where the strengths are.”
On possible political opposition, he said: ”The department will have to tough it out, but I think its approach will gradually be accepted.”
However, Gessler Nkondo, spokesperson for the Association for Black Empowerment in Higher Education, said the department’s approach would ”entrench the same problems of historical inequalities we’ve been trying to address for 12 years. Without specific redress funding very few universities will benefit. Such funding is necessary if you want to reform historically disadvantaged universities into respectable institutions.”
The department’s differentiated approach runs the risk that ”those on the periphery — such as in rural areas — will become junior partners in the system of higher education”, said Sipho Seepe, academic director of Henley Management College. ”If we don’t believe in the abilities of these institutions we should come out straight — and close them.”
Discussions between the Education Department and institutions are not yet completed, Qhobela said. ”There has been a first round, which will be followed up shortly.”