I’ve been following the student protests at the University of Johannesburg and the University of the Witwatersrand with some interest. I have been doing so not because there’s anything new on show, but purely for the theatre of this annual fracas. It was a bit surprising that it came around earlier this year — normally the open season for student fees is early February, but the arguments, the heated rhetoric and the fizzling out at the end all played along very familiar lines. Even the actors were the usual culprits.
On the one hand were the academics and university leaders trying to unpack the figures to show the annual decrease in state funding. They were largely cautious, often bewildered, but aware that they could be transformed, all too easily, into the enemy of the peace.
On the other hand were the student leaders. Voluble rather than coherent, strident rather than structured, they traipse out the old chestnuts about demanding free higher education, of how institutional management are evil capitalists plundering the hefty coffers for their own gain and bickering among the many splinter groups that constitute student leadership.
Without wishing to over-determine this fortnight of disruption, I was a little taken aback by the long legs that this protest had. What should have been over in four days carried on and on each passing day unearthing another twist in the rather predictable plot. Personally, I suspect that South African higher education has acquired an additional valency within the past 18 months.
Without any concerted attempt on the part of institutions or the sector, higher education has been identified by government as the goose that just could lay the golden egg.
When Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka scouted around for mechanisms through which she could realise her accelerated and shared growth initiative for South Africa and Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition (Jipsa) initiatives, she settled on higher education as a key sector for realising her ambition. Now whether higher education fully understands the additional mantel that has been placed on its shoulders is open to question. But the signs are everywhere.
The increase in reportage on higher education now covers a much broader agenda. It’s no longer about higher education per se, but about higher education as a producer of scarce and critical skills, as a research engine to achieve global competitiveness and as a factory that creates work-ready labourers. While this may be creating some consternation within those universities which produce that ineffable entity called the graduate, the idea of creating street-smart workers is the strength of the universities of technology (UOT).
With the new Higher Education Qualifications Framework (HEQF) there is again the possibility that the department of education will subsidise work-integrated learning (WIL). But even during the unsubsidised period, the UOTs have doggedly stuck to their conviction that, without work experience, the graduate will have to undergo some kind of additional training before they can bring value to business. This not only means that business has to bear an additional cost, but also that there is a potential gulf between the world of work and what is taught at many of our institutions. Repeatedly over the past months the sector has been chided in the press about unresponsive curricula — even if this is more a perception than a reality, a student internship would quickly highlight curriculum shortfalls.
So here’s the idea. Extend the length of all qualifications to include a credit-bearing internship. As with the UOTs, graduation requires that students successfully complete this service-learning component. The logistics would be coordinated at institutional level in partnership with business and the department of labour (or the department of learning as Merlyn Mehl recently dubbed it).
Students would serve their period wherever they were most needed by the state, be that in rural or urban areas, the only proviso being that their training period would be appropriate to their area of study. This initiative would respond ably to the National Youth Service’s attempt to increase civil society participation and the spirit of volunteerism. For Jipsa it would mean a substantial injection of nearly qualified students into all areas where there are skill shortages and it would have the added bonus of instilling a sense of nation-building within our youth.
And wait, there’s more. This kind of three-way partnership could be built on a strict cost-recovery model with the idea that surplus funds could be ploughed back into the National Student Financial Aid Scheme or even back into the department of education, with the intention of increasing the state subsidy offered to universities.
Imagine 200 000 extra workers in the economy a year, plugging the gaps at exactly the places where they are most needed. Imagine the end of the annual student protests. Imagine a higher education committed and responsive to the needs of the developmental state.