Bee: Helping or Hurting?. Anthea Jeffery
top schools, and often from wealthy families’. These applicants have ‘marks high enough to be admitted in straight competition with white students, without any affirmative action intervention’. At the same time, many black students from good schools still do not perform as well as white students from the same schools, because of ‘trans-generational factors’, such as the limited education of their parents or a home language different from the language of instruction. Such factors must also be taken into account, he says.56
As Price explains it, the 2016 student intake will generally ‘admit about 75% of students based either on marks alone, or on marks weighted upwards by an index of disadvantage’. This index will consider home language, quality of school attended, and the educational levels of parents and grandparents. For the remaining 25% of places, UCT will select the top black applicants, who will be measured solely against other black applicants. Using race in this way, says Price, will help provide compensation for past discrimination and promote diversity.57
Adds Price: ‘Over the last 20 years, the old colonial and apartheid correspondence of race and class has been shifting. About a half of black students at UCT are now middle class.’ This raises questions as to ‘whether it is fair to whites … that black students should get in at the expense of white students who may even be less privileged’. UCT’s dependence on students having to ‘self-identify their race’ has also led to difficulties. Some do not want to do so on principle. ‘Other students wilfully misclassify themselves … [by] claiming to be coloured. Since there is no legislated way of classifying people, this puts UCT admissions officers in the untenable position of having to decide how such applicants should really be classified. This we refuse to do,’ said Price.58
However, the new policy will vary significantly in the way it is applied in different faculties. In the medical school, for instance, only 9% of first-year places will be allocated on marks alone, while 33% will be decided on marks weighted upwards by the university’s index of disadvantage. This means that the remaining 58% of places (rather than the 25% generally applicable) will still be ‘race-based’, says Price. Hence, these places will continue to be allocated to the top black applicants, measured only against other black applicants. In practice, the university expects the proportion of successful African applicants to its medical school to rise from 37.5% in 2014 to 40% in 2016, while the proportion of white students will diminish slightly.59
A similar debate on the need to review admissions criteria has also been evident at the University of the Witwatersrand. The university likewise applies racial criteria in admitting students to its medical school and, in the words of its vice-chancellor, Adam Habib, ‘requires students from different races to achieve different score thresholds to qualify for admittance’. Though race is only one of the criteria used and other measures of ‘social engagement and disadvantage’ are also taken into account, Habib said in February 2014 that the time had come to rethink the university’s medical admission policies.60
In June 2014 the university decided on a new admissions policy for its medical school, which is to take effect in 2015. This system will allow 40% of medical students to be admitted from the ranks of top academic achievers, irrespective of their race. As for the remaining 60% of places, 20% will be reserved exclusively for top African and coloured applicants, while 20% will go to the best pupils from rural schools – so as to tackle the shortage of doctors in rural areas – and the remaining 20% will go to the best pupils from the poorest 40% of urban schools.61
Said Habib in April 2014: ‘Many insist on the necessity of race to determine disadvantage. But the danger with differential requirements for distinct groups is that, although it enables historical redress, it runs the risk of undermining the constitutional goal of building a new national identity. This is because young white students believe they are being asked to pay for the sins of their parents. Moreover, it has the perverse consequence that privileged black students – the children of BEE [black economic empowerment] barons and the politically connected – are put on an equal footing with the most disadvantaged.’ Hence, there is a need to ‘use criteria other than race in enrolment strategies’ and to give more emphasis to other indicators of disadvantage or suitability. Moreover, in faculties outside the medical school, ‘students compete on an equal footing’ and without reference to race. Some 70% of Wits students are nevertheless black – and this ‘despite the fact that race quotas do not exist’.62
Racial criteria are also used in admissions to the medical school at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and at both the medical and veterinary faculties at the University of Pretoria. In the veterinary faculty, this is done by dividing students into two categories: ‘open’ and ‘designated groups’. White students are placed in the open category, and must compete for some 44 places on merit within their own group, while black students likewise compete on merit for a further 44 places within their own group. AfriForum, a lobby group, has complained that outstanding white applicants are unfairly prejudiced by barring them from applying for the 44 places set aside for blacks, but the university responds that the state subsidy it receives for its veterinary science programme depends in part on ‘improvements to the equity profile’ of the faculty. According to the university, ‘its selection criteria and processes … are fair and reasonable, taking into consideration the educational history of the country, the limited resources available for veterinary training, and the needs of the country in this particular profession’.63
Outside of medical or veterinary faculties, the use of racial criteria by universities is generally not explicit. The main exception is the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where in the words of its vice-chancellor, Malegapuru Makgoba, ‘a certain number of spaces are allocated to each racial group and applicants within that group compete against each other for available places’. As a result, he adds, ‘the majority of places go to black applicants’. At the University of Pretoria, by contrast, there are no specific equity targets and the university says it ‘does not use race’ as a proxy for disadvantage. However, it does ‘strive to have a diverse student body’ and ‘a 50:50 split between black and white students’.64
At the University of the Free State the use of race is perhaps more overt, for the university seeks to ‘promote redress’ and bring about ‘equity in the race … composition of the student body’, as Vice-Chancellor Jansen puts it. Though it insists on ‘selecting fairly’, it also applies ‘access principles’ that rely not only on academic success but also help identify ‘potential students from disadvantaged groups and deprived backgrounds’.65
The University of Stellenbosch says ‘it is problematic to use race as the basis for effecting redress’, but nevertheless believes that ‘racial categories are the most relevant indicators available for groups of people previously subjected to discrimination’. It seeks to admit students from such groups ‘in line with the intention of the Constitution’, but is also concerned that ‘the use of race in admission policies is becoming increasingly problematic’.
By contrast, the University of Johannesburg says it ‘does not use race to determine who should be admitted’. Instead, it applies the parameters laid down in the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, a state bursary scheme for disadvantaged students, to identify ‘academically deserving and financially needy students’. On this basis, the university’s student population has already become 87% black, bringing it fully into line with the demographic profile of the economically active population.66
Affirmative action in staff appointments and funding
Universities, like all designated employers of 50 staff members or more, are obliged, under the Employment Equity Act of 1998, to make ‘reasonable’ progress towards demographic representivity at all tiers of employment. But this is not easy to achieve, given both the skills shortage and the extent to which experienced black South Africans have already been absorbed into public and private sector jobs. Yet universities that fail to fill their targets at professorial and other academic levels currently face fines of up to R500 000 for a first such ‘offence’. For a fifth similar offence within three years, the maximum fine that could be imposed is R900 000. Moreover, under the Employment Equity Amendment Act of 2013, these maximum fines are to be greatly increased and could go as high as 10% of annual turnover (see Chapter 3).
Wits, for one, has thus been conservative