Student fees under fire

A special task team representing South African universities is expected to report to Education Minister Naledi Pandor early next year about the feasibility of government regulation of tuition fees.

The task team was set up under the auspices of Higher Education South Africa (Hesa), which represents all universities, following a request by Pandor earlier this year that the sector consider whether fees should have a ceiling or be determined within certain parameters.

Fee regulation is unlikely to be accepted by the sector despite a pressing need to find a solution to the problem of rising tuition fees at South African universities.

Violent student protests erupted at the University of the Witwatersrand last week and the University of Johannesburg (UJ) this week over fee hikes and pushed the issue to the fore again.

The protests at Wits followed a proposal by the university’s council for an upfront student registration fee of about 25% of the total tuition fees for the 2008 academic year. This meant that students would be expected to fork out R5 500 upfront as opposed to the current R4 200.

The university set different fee increases according to each faculty’s needs. Proposed hikes for the Bachelor of Education degree shot up the highest, at 18%. An 8% increase in commerce, law and management and humanities was proposed, while a 10% increase was set for engineering and the built environment, and 9% for the health sciences.

Furthermore, the university proposed an increase in accommodation fees of 9% and 11%, respectively, in non-catering and catering residences.

Following negotiations between the university and the students, the upfront registration fee has been reduced to R5 000. The B.Ed hike has been reduced to 9%, while the fees in the rest of the faculties will remain at, or be decreased to, 8%. At residences there will be fee remissions.

‘We have accepted the university’s decision to push down some of the fees and we are confident that they will keep their promise of not privatising the residences,” said Wits Student Representative Council president-elect Themba Masondo.

UJ students also protested when they found out that the university had plans to increase 2008 fees by 14%. They disrupted lectures at three main campuses, but lectures continued at the Kingsway campus, where demonstrating students were denied access.

The situation got worse on Monday and Tuesday when police arrested 40 students and shot rubber bullets to disperse the crowds at Kingsway.

UJ spokesperson Sonia Cronje said: ‘The students have voiced their demands about the fees but the university has not yet received a formal written demand. For now it’s too early to say what will happen.”

South African Students Congress president David Maimela this week blamed the ministry of education for neglecting students. He said the recent events were a result of the minister’s tendency to undermine the role of students in the country.

There have been calls on the government to increase the R1,7-billion that the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS), the government’s loan plan for poor students, has under its management.

Anthony Melck, a member of the University of Pretoria’s executive who serves on Hesa’s tuition task team, said NSFAS was a rational solution to the student fee dilemma.

‘NSFAS is an excellent scheme. It is administered well and has won international acclaim. But it does not have enough funding. NSFAS should be given additional funding to bridge the timing problem. This would be a rational solution,” Melck said.

Allan Taylor, a specialist in higher education access and former head of NSFAS, said that to bring equilibrium to the escalation in fees and the ability of students to pay them would demand innovative measures adopted by both the state and higher education institutions. ‘This may require special funding arrangements for financially needy students since it would not be right to relegate poor students to institutions where fees are lower than others.”

Taylor said a problem was that too many institutions admitted students without knowing who was going to pay their tuition. ‘I believe this is morally indefensible: to admit a poor student, then tell the student that the institution cannot adequately assist with funding — and then kick the student out at the end of the year because he/she has not paid his/her fees,.”

Universities must adopt a comprehensive approach to ensure that all admitted students could meet their financial obligations whether by private means, by bursary or by loan.

Taylor said institutions should be able to show how fees are determined and what the component costs are of each course.

But Melck said a Hesa survey earlier this year showed that all institution had systems to inform stakeholders, including students, of budgetary processes. It was, however, often up to SRCs to communicate the details to the rest of the students.

Melck said the Hesa task team had been looking at the issue of tuition broadly, including competing interests for scarce government resources and the state of funding to higher education institutions.

The total subsidy for higher education had increased and additional funding had been made available for recapitalisation and increased efficiencies, such as the training of more engineers. However, this had not brought relief to the ‘normal subsidies” that institutions were receiving. A growth in student numbers and inflation meant that the per capita expenditure in real terms had been declining and increased fees have to make up for the shortfall.

Said Melck: ‘Students do have a point, but there is no such thing as free education. Somebody has to pay for it. That somebody else may be the school child not receiving a sandwich through the school-feeding scheme. These are trade-offs. Somebody is paying and that person may be poorer than the student.”

He said bringing price regulation into higher education in a free market economy was not a good idea.