By Audrey Simango
Higher education in South Africa risks becoming elitist, hurting meritocracy and locking out learners from poor and working-class families, argue students at Wits University in Johannesburg. Since February, they have been blockading roads, uprooting sidewalk bricks, lighting up tires, besieging university officials and issuing ultimatums to the country's universities minister.
Accelerating their activities from 4 March, a group of Wits University students forcefully halted the registration of students for the 2021 academic year. The issue they are raising is that students with large debts are unable to register. They are demanding that students with college debts of R150,000 ($10,100) or more be allowed to sign up for classes. The management at Wits University rejected the call.
On 10 March, police killed a man while they were trying to suppress the protests.
“No student must register until everyone registers. No one must access a system until everyone accesses it,” said Mfeka Mpendulo, the president of the Wits University student representative council, at a street rally on 4 March.
The roots and the causes
Economist Anthony Black, a professor at The University of Cape Town (UCT), tells The Africa Report that the vast majority of indebted students in South Africa are Black. “There is a structural problem [in South Africa]. Student enrolments have been growing especially from young people from the lower-middle income and lower-income backgrounds, who cannot afford fees,” says Black.
The headcount enrolment of black students into higher education jumped from 515,058 in 2008 to 689,503 in 2013, data from the World Education Services consultancy shows. The African National Congress (ANC) government under President Cyril Ramaphosa aims to ramp up the numbers to 1.5 million by 2030.
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Black says that South Africa is struggle to meet the demand for education, and “I think a very serious problem has been the failure to expand high-quality technical education.”
To whom does the buck belong?
Blade Nzimande, the universities minister since 2009, attributes the uptick in enrolment and the related rise in student anger, to former president Jacob Zuma.
In response to the #FeesMustFall protests – a widespread movement that began in 2015 to protest the high cost of education and the Black population’s marginalisation – in 2017 Zuma proclaimed the age of free education for “poor and working-class students”.
“As for the students, the ANC promised from the start access to universities for all to address the racial selectivity of apartheid,” Stephen Chan, a political scientist at the University of London, tells The Africa Report. “Much of [the] woes can be traced back to the Jacob Zuma era, but not all of it, as successive ANC governments have not properly planned for expanding demand.”
Black, the UCT economist, argues: “Zuma made promises which had not been costed or budgeted for.”
Race, class and other divides
Covid-19 has depleted household incomes in South Africa. The student leaders at Wits say that 8,000 students there have a combined debt of R21m and are at risk of being stopped from registering for the academic year
The 8,000 number is false, Shirona Patel, a spokesperson for Wits University, tells The Africa Report. She points to the statement of Zeblon Vilakazi, the vice-chancellor of Wits University, who said: “It is not true that Wits has excluded 6,000-8,000 students: This number refers to all the students who owe Wits money over the last seven years, including some of whom have dropped out and others who have been academically excluded for failing multiple times, and who have lost their bursaries as a result.”
Indebted students at Wits now owe R1bn, double what was owed in 2017, said Vilakazi, whilst making it clear that student debt is now a South-Africa wide issue.
Disputed demands
Not all students agree on the demands that protestors are making, with some calling for free education.
“Students are unreasonable. A university cannot run free tuition and still pay for lights, water, professors,” says 27-year-old Courage Sango, who graduated from Wits University four years ago with zero debt, and is now a junior banker in Sandton, a posh Johannesburg suburb.
Sango admits he is lucky though. “Oh yes. My father is a law firm partner, very well off that he asked mum to stay at home with her history degree and raise us. My varsity fees were paid four years in advance.”
Bum in seats
Steve Koch, who heads the department of economics at the University of Pretoria, tells The Africa Report that the current university funding model pays schools for “bums in seats” and graduations.
“Given the massification in the system, the cost of keeping the student in the system a few years, [it] is not particularly burdensome, as long as they progress/graduate. The graduation payoff is fairly large to the institution, so maybe the institutions do ok, despite the large debt.”
So universities calculate that “since many of the graduates get jobs and it is possible for the universities to ‘force’ debt collection through employers, the calculation is that it makes sense to extend credit.”
For South African students, a university degree is highly sought after because it could raise a person’s salary by 15%, explains Koch.
“However, neither the backlog nor the investment in the future received near enough attention from the ANC from the moment they took over (at the end of apartheid in 1994),” he adds.
Will it ever be free?
Free education would be difficult to implement under current circumstances. The weak economy created staggeringly high youth unemployment – nearly 56% Koch estimates.
Chan adds: “Nzimande has been education minister for many years, but his own policies have not kept up with the tempo of the times. The students were led to believe that higher education should be free and so feel betrayed. This is a time bomb waiting to explode.”
Different paths to free education each have their problems.
If tuition debt is forgiven, South Africa’s taxpayers will carry the cost, says Koch. “If society is asked to pay more for this delivery, they will expect something in return or, as we are seeing widely, they will leave the country, and, instead, participate in a different social contract. On the other hand, if the universities are forced to ‘eat’ the debt, their ability to deliver this service will deteriorate.”
But education also helps the economy. Completed university education in South Africa raises a person’s employment probability by as much as 10% over those without it, says Koch.
“Earnings that students can earn for themselves from university is large. Thus, it does not make sense that large individual earnings opportunities are subsidised through free education for all. However, there are students who deserve to be in university and simply do not have the means to do so. They should be subsidised heavily.”
Paying the cost
Chan asks: “Can South Africa afford to reduce or abolish fees? Probably not this year, as the finance minister struggles to turn the failing economy around. But it’s also a vicious circle: without an educated workforce, globally competitive production will be impossible, the tax revenue base will never catch up,” he says.
Black, the UCT economist, suggests a compromise: “I think subsidised tuition should be combined with a loan element because, after all, once students graduate many will enter careers with good prospects and should then pay back.”
So far, the Ramaphosa government is not proposing any radical solutions to the education system’s problems. To get a grip on the latest unrest, on 11 March the South African treasury hastily unveiled an additional R7bn for first-time qualifying students so that they can enrol in tertiary studies. “I do not expect that this is enough,” concludes Koch.
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