Bee: Helping or Hurting?. Anthea Jeffery
– are being set up to fail, rather than being helped to climb the ladder to success. This has made the implementation of affirmative action at universities even more contentious than it might otherwise have been.
Affirmative action at universities
Well before the political transition, there was a rapid increase in the number of Africans passing their matric examination with grades good enough for university. In 1955 only 90 Africans had been able to achieve this, but in 1994 there were 45 000 African matriculants who passed with such grades – an increase of more than 68 000%.44 Hence, even before 1994, the number of black students at South Africa’s universities was rising sharply.
Since then, that number has accelerated still more rapidly. African student enrolment at universities (other than universities of technology) went up from 155 000 in 1999 to more than 516 800 in 2011, an increase of 234% in 12 years. In the same period, the number of coloured students at these universities went up from 15 000 in 1999 to some 47 300 in 2011, an increase of roughly 215%. Indian university student numbers more than doubled too, rising from 22 000 in 1999 to close on 50 000 in 2011, an increase of roughly 125%. White university enrolment went up as well, rising from 100 000 in 1999 to more than 165 600 in 2011, a more modest increase of around 66%.45
There has also been a major increase in the number of black students graduating from both universities and universities of technology. In 1991 some 8 500 Africans graduated from these institutions, whereas in 2011 some 34 200 did so, a rise of some 300% in two decades. The number of coloured and Indian higher education graduates also roughly doubled over the same period. By contrast, the number of white graduates fell from roughly 27 600 in 1991 to around 20 200 in 2011.46
Demand for university places among those with bachelor’s passes under the National Senior Certificate far exceeds supply. In 2013 there were some 145 600 applicants for a total of 25 000 places at the universities of the Witwatersrand, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Stellenbosch. (At the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), there were 35 000 applicants for 5 500 places; the University of Cape Town (UCT) had 20 000 applicants for 4 000 places; at the University of Johannesburg 75 000 applicants vied for 10 500 places; while at the University of Stellenbosch there were 15 600 applicants for 5 000 places.)47
With many more people applying than can be accommodated, questions arise as to how universities are making their admission decisions and to what extent racially based affirmative action is being used.
Racial criteria in university admissions
The Higher Education Act of 1997 states that university admission policies must ‘redress past discrimination and ensure representivity and equal access’. The government also requires all universities to report to it on the race of both applicants and students. Though this much of government policy is public knowledge, it seems (from a policy document obtained in 2012 under the Promotion of Access to Information Act of 2000) that the Department of Higher Education and Training also lays down racial targets for admissions, which are based on national racial demographics. Since state funding for universities depends in part on the fulfilment of these quotas,48 universities have an obvious interest in allocating as many university places as possible to African, coloured, and Indian students.
However, according to the country’s formerly white universities, it is only in faculties where competition for admission is acute that racial quotas have a significant impact on the decisions made. This racial focus is particularly evident at UCT, where the university’s admissions policy has long overtly differentiated between applicants on the basis of race and given particular preference to prospective African students.
In all faculties at UCT, African applicants qualify for admission on the basis of a lower point count than white applicants require. The difference in admission thresholds for Africans and whites varies from one faculty to another, and is particularly marked at the university’s medical school. In 2012 African applicants for the 200 first-year places at UCT’s medical faculty needed 534 points to qualify for admission, whereas white students needed 700 points. UCT also reserved an undisclosed number of its 200 places for African applicants whose point counts exceeded the 534 threshold. Only after it had made every effort to fill these reserved places with African (and other black) applicants did it offer any of these remaining places to white applicants with scores of 700 or more.49
UCT’s race-based policy has been much criticised in recent years. According to the university, its use of racial categories does not mean that ‘it accepts the notions of race that were the basis for race classification in pre-1994 South Africa’. On the contrary, said UCT vice-chancellor Max Price in 2012, the university wanted to move away from using race and was actively searching for an alternative criterion on which to base its affirmative action programme.50
Later that year, Price added that UCT was considering using socio-economic status instead of race, but feared this criterion would work against black people. He said black pupils at private or former Model C schools generally came from fairly wealthy homes, but nevertheless tended to have lower scores than white pupils. Despite their socio-economic status, they remained disadvantaged by their race, because:
■ black parents were less able to help their children with English, mathematics, or science;
■ black pupils were undermined by persistent negative racial stereotypes; and
■ the school system favoured pupils brought up with ‘an intimate familiarity with Western culture’, with its emphasis on science and empiricism.51
Such factors, Price went on, helped explain why ‘this first generation of black pupils at top schools performed as a group less well than white students’. Race remained a good proxy for these subtle deprivations and was thus still ‘the most accurate indicator of disadvantage’.52
Others disagreed. Much of the criticism of UCT’s racial policy came from David Benatar, professor of philosophy at the university, who said: ‘If we assume Price’s analysis is correct, we are well on the way to alternatives to the use of race in admission decisions. We could favour those whose parents did not complete school, or don’t have university degrees, or are not fluent in English … It is unarguably the case that tenaciously adhering to “race” as the best proxy for “disadvantage” is feeding the stereotype that “blacks” are educationally inferior, and it is hard to see how this could foster self-confidence in “black” children and students.’
Benatar added that no proxy for disadvantage would ever be perfect, but said the use of ‘race’ was ‘a particularly toxic’ one. ‘It is steeped in South Africa’s appalling past and it reinforces the racial thinking that is both morally reprehensive and damaging. There are alternatives that are much less obnoxious and they should be embraced.’53
In June 2011 Amanda Ngwenya, president of the UCT Students’ Representative Council, urged the university to recognise that ‘disadvantage was not “black”’, and that there were now many black applicants ‘who could reasonably be expected to help themselves’. She called on ‘all new students applying to UCT to refuse to declare themselves as belonging to a particular race group on the university’s admission forms’.54
In April 2013 UCT announced that it planned to revise its admissions policy, as the use of race in this way was ‘undesirable’ and ‘other criteria for determining the previously disadvantaged would have to be found’. Price said the debate at the university had focused attention on four important and inter-related problems:
■ whether it was possible to provide redress without reference to race;
■ how to cater for the fact that many black applicants were no longer disadvantaged;
■ the difficulty of ‘applying a system of race classification when there was no legal basis for classifying’; and
■ the fact that ‘many students of colour, on principle, did not want to declare their “race” [while] other students wilfully misclassified themselves – particularly whites and Indians claiming to be coloured’.55
In June 2014 UCT finally made the decision to introduce