Unemployment, poor water supplies and sanitation, lack of access to information, high incidence of HIV/Aids, poor infrastructure and inadequate education and training are some of the problems that rural communities are facing in Kwazulu-Natal. Many of these problems are linked, so tackling them requires an integrated approach. And the University of Zululand is doing just that.
These days conservation is a politically sensitive issue. It often involves the management of restricted land from which people have been displaced. This creates the need for conservationists to address sustainable livelihoods and poverty alleviation in their agendas. A new University of KwaZulu-Natal course aims to broaden students’ perceptions of conservation.
Journalism is a major growth area in South African tertiary education, and in the process of expanding the area has become ever more sophisticated. No longer can media courses content themselves with training aspiring journalists how to identify newsworthy stories and then write them. Media management is a new item in the armoury of some media studies programmes.
As the costs of higher education escalate and the struggle intensifies to gain access to higher education and succeed in acquiring a qualification that opens up employment opportunities, the issue of the quality of higher education is becoming more urgent. Mala Singh explains how one can assess the standard of an academic programme or qualification.
The single most important observation that can be made about race and education after 10 years of democracy is that schools and universities have been much more successful at meeting the demand for racial desegregation than achieving the ideal of social integration. It is very important not to confuse these two constructs. It’s one thing to open the doors of learning, quite another to change what’s behind them.
For most first-year students a tertiary study institution can be a daunting place, especially when if they are living on campus, far removed from their families and situated among thousands of students who are mostly, at first, complete strangers.
The dean of students at the Vaal University of Technology (VUT) is someone who has recognised these adjustment strains and decided to do something about it.
The results of the re-accreditation of the 37 MBA programmes undertaken by the Higher Education Quality Committee of the Council on Higher Education between 2002 and 2003 were welcomed by many people. But they also generated much anxiety and uncertainty. We explain the road ahead after the recent controversial review of business administration degrees.
If Supersport United and Wits University played all night they probably would had failed to find the back of the net. As a result the disappointing opening Castle Premiership match for both these so-called top sides resulted in a damp squib with neither side scoring in a boring 0-0 draw.
The world’s top-quality MBAs would probably not be accredited by the Council on Higher Education (CHE). If Stanford University, for example, wanted to establish a campus in South Africa to offer its prestigious MBA, it would fail to meet several CHE criteria. Stanford offers an international MBA. This would not satisfy CHE’s requirements that all MBAs be ”localised”. The CHE’s review of MBAs was ”seriously flawed”.
”’You thought it was about seeking the truth?’ an amused ex-academic asked me recently. Yes, I did think that was what a PhD was about, and I still do firmly believe it. But the university today is the last place a truth-seeker can feel at home.” How, oes a dedicated young student resist the pressures of today’s pseudo-academia?