Bee: Helping or Hurting?. Anthea Jeffery
(5%), senior lecturers (8%), lecturers (15%), and associate lecturers (22%). African representation has nevertheless generally lagged behind the targets identified. At the professorial level, for instance, African representation rose to 2% in 2012 against the 4% target set, while among associate professors it reached 3% rather than the 5% target specified. In August 2013 Habib said ‘the principles of academic freedom’ had wrongly been invoked in the past ‘by some university leaders … to stop transformation’. He thus planned to achieve greater racial diversity among academic staff through the use of ‘explicit or implicit racial quotas’.67 More recently, however, he has modified his views, instead stressing the need for a balance between ‘addressing the disparities of the past [and] continuing to be cosmopolitan … and globally competitive’.68
At the University of KwaZulu-Natal, by contrast, 67% of its academic leadership was black in 2011, compared with 38% in 2004. As for other formerly ‘white’ universities, UCT plans to increase its proportion of black staff at the professorial and associate professor level from 12% in 2009 to 22% by 2015. It also aims to bring black representation among senior lecturers and lecturers up from 30% to 36% over the same period. The University of the Free State had a general target of 40% representation for ‘designated’ groups (black people, women, and the disabled) at senior levels, to be attained by the end of 2013. In 2010, when it adopted this target, the representation of these groups stood at 19% at the professorial level, 25% among associate professors, and 30% among lecturers and researchers. Its 55% target for junior lecturers and researchers had already been attained.69
As regards state funding for universities, there is also a strong element of affirmative action in the formula applied to formerly ‘black’ and ‘white’ universities. Though this subsidy formula is complicated, the bottom line, says UCT’s Max Price, is that ‘for any given discipline and level of study, the formerly black universities receive more per student than the formerly white ones. This is also the intention of the funding mechanism, which top-slices the higher education budget under a number of categories to give additional support to the formerly black universities.’70 Yet 60% of all research and postgraduate output comes from five of the formerly white universities, while formerly black institutions – many of which were established in the erstwhile homelands for largely ideological reasons – also have dismal academic standards in general.
This raises questions as to how well affirmative action in university funding serves the country’s needs. In addition, even with the preference that is applied, funding for formerly black universities remains inadequate, as these institutions cannot rely on the external research grants or alumni donations generally available to UCT, Wits, and other formerly white universities. This funding shortfall has prompted many of the formerly black institutions to increase their student numbers as much as possible, so as to bring in more tuition fees and a larger state subsidy. However, as Price writes, though this has generated an increase in income, the extra revenue has come ‘at the expense of quality, space, staff time for research, infrastructure maintenance, and capital development’.71
Over the past ten years the government has also reduced its overall funding for universities, putting all of them under increased financial pressure. According to a recent report commissioned by the Department of Higher Education and Training, expenditure on higher education in South Africa makes up about 12% of overall spending on education, whereas elsewhere in Africa it makes up some 20%. Universities here have thus generally lacked the funds to hire more lecturers or expand teaching facilities to accommodate rising student numbers. As a result, lecture halls are often too small to accommodate first-year classes that have grown to 600 students or more. Students commonly sit on the floor or spill out into passageways, where they battle to hear their lecturers at all. Academic staff are called upon to mark thousands of test scripts and cannot give students the detailed feedback they need, diminishing the learning experience.
According to the department’s report, the higher education system is thus ‘very inefficient’ and is ‘performing way below most of the targets set’. The report recommends that funding for higher education should be increased, but cautions that this should not be done until ‘high levels of inefficiency’, along with ‘corruption and mismanagement of funds’, have first been addressed and overcome.72
Despite the problems of over-crowding already evident, the government is nevertheless planning a vast increase in student numbers, which the fiscus will battle to sustain. All universities are thus likely to experience the pressures on quality, research, maintenance, and capital expenditure that currently dog the formerly black institutions, in particular. Moreover, without significant improvements in the quality of schooling, current high drop-out and failure rates will continue, adding to the wastefulness already evident. However, the government seems impervious to these risks. It has already established two new universities: one at Kimberley (Northern Cape) and the other at Mbombela (Mpumalanga), both of which admitted their first students in 2014. It also plans to establish a new medical university (the Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University) in Limpopo. In addition, it remains intent on increasing student numbers from 970 000 in 2010 to more than 1.6 million in 2030, a rise of close on 70%.73
High failure and drop-out rates at universities
Questions inevitably arise as to what benefits preferential admissions – and other affirmative action policies – are bringing when graduation rates among African undergraduate students remain worryingly low.
A bleak picture of student failure has recently emerged from two reports on throughput rates compiled in 2012 and 2013 by the Council on Higher Education, a statutory body charged with monitoring the state of the higher education system. According to the 2012 report, only 16% of Africans who enrolled in 2005 for three-year undergraduate degrees managed to graduate by 2007, within the regulation time, while 50% dropped out. By 2010, six years after initial enrolment, 41% of Africans from this initial cohort had graduated, while 59% had dropped out and had no further prospect of being able to gain their degrees. Graduation rates among coloured and Indian students were also low – at around 23% within the regulation three-year period – and it was only among white students that outcomes were significantly better, 44% graduating within the regulation time and 31% dropping out.74
The council’s 2013 report found a similar pattern among students who had first registered in 2006 for three-year undergraduate degrees. Within this group, only 20% of Africans had graduated in the regulation time, as opposed to 44% of whites. Financial constraints had contributed to these outcomes, the report went on, but the key factor lay in ‘systematic academic obstacles to learning’.75
Commented The Star in an editorial: ‘When you consider it requires a scandalous 35% average in matric to gain a National Senior Certificate, it’s no wonder so many undergraduates are not doing well, and will never earn a degree or a qualification … Neither Basic Education’s Angie Motshekga nor higher education minister Blade Nzimande can show they have changed the learning landscape for the better during their years of office … While finances remain a problem, this disaster is not only about money. It’s also about a lack of academic preparedness (read poor schooling) and … an appalling lack of ambition and will to improve public education in our country.’76
Increased state control for ‘transformation’
Despite the salience of such strictures, Nzimande seems more concerned about expanding state control over universities so as to ensure their further racial transformation. This is illustrated by two recent developments, in particular: the establishment of a special committee on transformation, and the additional powers given to the minister under legislation adopted in December 2012.
In 2013 Nzimande appointed a seven-member ‘ministerial oversight committee on transformation’ to audit progress at South African universities and advise him on policies to combat racism. The Council on Higher Education questioned the need for this new body, saying it had already established a committee of its own to monitor and assess this issue. Jansen was more forthright, saying the formation of the new committee ‘did not make any sense’. Said Jansen: ‘There is no university that is not struggling with transformation or fails to understand its importance. I don’t know why we need a policeman. A university is not a prison. It is an autonomous institution with smart people who understand their duty to the future.’77