Much has been said about the skills shortage in South Africa. Yet, while both the public and private sectors of the economy decry this, almost everyone knows of an unemployed graduate in their area.
Many such graduates are engineers. And unemployment rates are highest among young South Africans — 65% compared to 37% of the general working age population. The number of unemployed graduates however has shot up from 60 000 to more than 200 000 over the past five years, according to a Statistics South Africa report last year. Hard facts therefore indicate that those who argue that the real crisis facing the country is skills mismatch rather than skills shortage have a point.
The next logical question then is: Whose responsibility is it to ensure the country continues to have a healthy supply of young and appropriate skills? It is clear that someone, or institution(s), are failing not only young people but our entire society by imparting to young minds skills that are either irrelevant or inappropriate to the needs of our knew knowledge economy. Setas, which were premised on the need to narrow the skills gap, have simply joined their higher education colleagues by not applying enough market research to determine the skills needs of the country and work backwards to align their curricula accordingly. In fact they have gone a step further — by stockpiling their cash, sometimes in shady investment vehicles, rather than pursue their original mandate.
To get to the bottom of the problem, an in-depth analysis of the further and higher education sector is imperative. The initial funding model for higher education prioritised registration rates. Universities, universities of technology (the former technikons) and further education and training (FET) colleges were rewarded handsomely for merely registering students, without much regard as to whether such recruits actually continue to complete their studies. The revolving door at such institutions ran non-stop, especially for under-prepared students, where they were registered the one year and excluded the next, or simply allowed to be perpetual students, taking and dropping modules without much progress.
Then the department of education instituted a new funding formula that prioritised graduation rates, and higher education immediately changed its tack and replaced the revolving door by not only using a straight edge to align the front and back doors, but also bringing such doors as close to one another as possible in order to get students out of the system as quickly as possible in an effort to maximise their subsidy allocation.
Humanities faculties were initially blamed for producing dinosaur-era graduates who could not find their place in the economy. But now employers lament the skills and knowledge levels of graduates in all faculties where extensive and costly retraining has to be done in an effort to make new recruits skills relevant.
In the private sector a business will close down if its product does not sell, but not so in the higher education. One of the reasons these institutions continue their ostrich syndrome and their exacerbation of the skills crisis instead of discharging their mandate can be attributed to their notoriously poor leadership when it comes to resource management and, more so, human capital management.
At business schools students are hammered about employees being the heartbeat of the organisation while the customer remains king. In higher education the impression is that the institution can do better without academics and students are simply a necessary evil. People development and support are supposedly not the function of human resources in this sector, which sees its role as to crack the whip in line with management wishes. Students across campuses attest to the user unfriendly and at times hostile university student admin systems right from registration through to graduation.
The gulf between the pay package of academics and senior administrators can only be crossed with an ocean liner. Much has been said about teacher salaries in the recent past, but a typical senior lecturer with PhD and a string of publications, interspersed with years of family neglect as almost all holidays and weekends are taken over by marking and setting tests and exams, can expect to earn less than what a plumber will get in the private sector.
To put this into perspective, consider the ABSA quarterly house price index, which showed a mid-range house was last year priced at around R1-million. This house would have cost around R200 000 in 2000. To afford such a house one needs an income of over R35 000 per month. Even senior professors at the twilight of their career would battle to afford this property, yet higher education leadership continue its pipe dream of hoping to attract the best and brightest minds into the sector.
Some solutions should involve a recognition by vice-chancellors and principals that their sector is human capital-dependant and this is where their investment needs to be focused to start with. Recruiting and looking well after their staff will ensure that their students, who are at the heart of their very existence, are well taken care of. Lecturers need to be rewarded not only for producing graduates, but also for ensuring that such graduates at least find jobs and preferably also create jobs for others in the economy.
Academics’ jobs do not end once their student leaves their buildings, and if their product does not find or create jobs this would be a clear signal that radical changes need to be made in the programme to offer skills needed in the economy. The focus should move away from producing job-seekers to producing job creators.
This can only be achieved through allowing academics limited time to consult in the area of their expertise in the economy. Besides indirectly supplementing their meagre salaries, this may ensure that they are at the forefront of changes in their field and could invariably bring this into classroom and effect necessary curricula changes. The alternative is to produce textbook graduates who do not fit into the practical world, as is currently the case.
Perhaps the time has come once again for the education department to review their higher education subsidy allocation to include accountability for relevant skill and job creation from our ivory towers.
Sello Mokoena is a master’s research supervisor at Regent Business School. He writes in his personal capacity