Education minister Naledi Pandor has asked her advisory body, the Council on Higher Education, to look into the viability of a four-year undergraduate degree as a response to South Africa’s 50% university drop-out rate.
This emerged from a Presidential Working Group meeting this week, comprising the university vice-chancellors’ association, Higher Education South Africa, education officials and President Thabo Mbeki.
With the exception of professional and medical degrees most degrees offered at South African universities take three years to complete.
Half the country’s students drop out before completing their degrees and employers have complained about the quality of graduates, who, they say, they have to retrain.
Pandor told the Mail & Guardian this week that in some cases young people knew little about their country or Africa. She said: ”I made it clear to the Presidential Working Group that a four-year degree is not merely a restructuring of the curriculum, but that the investigation should include innovative thinking.
”Do we limit a science student to just science courses or do we include literature? Should we have modules on African studies and developmental studies and courses in statistical numeracy? How do we modernise the programme?”
While a four-year degree would require additional government funding, she argued that ”we are already squeezing too much into three years”. Government already funds year-long foundation programmes and academic development programmes for weak students at some universities.
Medical academics are calling for expanded training facilities to enable them to take in more first year students. Pandor said the education and health ministries are working towards a fully fledged medical faculty at the University of Limpopo’s Polokwane campus. Its medical campus (Medunsa) is based in Ga-Rankuwa.
Pandor said the campuses are widely separated and there have been discussions about the construction of a training hospital close to the new faculty.
In her education budget speech in Parliament on Thursday Pandor will announce that R800-million has been allocated to universities for the clinical training of medical students under the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework.
She said this ring-fenced funding was a response to requests from medical academics for support in the clinical training of students. Funds will be used to employ clinical training staff and buy equipment for training, medical journals and research.
”This is a new provision and it’s very important. It provides a base,” she said. Although the education department subsidises medical students, lecturers are jointly appointed by provincial health departments and universities. Medical schools have been ”Cinderella” faculties in terms of infrastructure upgrades and staffing.
Welcoming the move, University of Cape Town spokesperson Gerda Kruger said: ”As budgets for health services have been reduced in the past few years, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain a good standard of clinical teaching and supervision for health sciences students. We will be able to provide better supervision and teaching in the hospitals and clinics where our students are placed.”
Pandor, meanwhile, said her ministry is looking at how ”we expand facilities for the training of teachers. We need to retain the training of teachers in the higher education sector.” In April she said she was considering reopening some of the teacher training colleges closed in the 1990s.
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