Higher education’s “Eskom syndrome”

South Africa was shocked two weeks ago by the death of a woman when prospective students stampeded in a desperate race for admission at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). Various reasons have since been offered why thousands of young South Africans cannot be accommodated at the country’s 23 universities and some controversial solutions have been proposed. But the underlying cause seems to be  similar to what caused South Africa’s electricity crisis: poor planning and inadequate infrastructure investment and development.

The tragedy at UJ cast the spotlight on the totally inadequate capacity of South Africa’s higher education infrastructure. According to reports  South African universities received 658,142 applications for just 162,929 available places this year, meaning 495,213 hopeful young people had to be turned away.

Universities failed to increase their first-year enrolments significantly for this year, with only 10 out of the 23 universities adding a miniscule total of 3,261 places more than in 2011. This despite some, like the University of the Witwatersrand, embarking on a R1.2bn infrastructure upgrade.

Just days after the tragedy at UJ, Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande was expounding on his plans to grow enrolment at universities to more than 1.5 million students. He wants to do this by creating virtual campuses, or extending distance learning beyond Unisa (which holds the monopoly) to all the other universities.

While the idea is supported by several university administrators in principle, it would  require substantial new bureaucracies, investment in extensive new technology, and provision of physical space at huge cost.

The South African education budget is one of the biggest – by percentage – in the world, yet since 1994 no money has been spent on new universities. Nzimande however is the first to make money available for expansion at existing universities.

After the UJ-tragedy, Nzimande also responded with a controversial suggestion to centralise registration of all universities through a single channel.

The suggestion was widely denounced as an impractical and even unconstitutional knee-jerk reaction, reminiscent of old Soviet-style administration.

The South African Academy of Art and Science said it would be unconstitutional, while centralisation of applications would not address the capacity problems, nor solve any of the other problems caused by “wrong choices.”

Therein lies the rub: The problem is capacity, not enrolment channels.

The roots of the problem are the failure since the 1990s to identify the real challenges, to plan adequately for future demand, and to increase capacity accordingly and timorously, accompanied by policy decisions which added to rather than alleviating pressures.

The Eskom-syndrome

Higher education has followed the same pattern as the one that led to Eskom’s power supply crisis and rolling power blackouts in 2008 -- and consumers are now footing the massive rescue bill with dramatic increases in electricity tariffs to finance Eskom’s capacity expansion.

Much the same pattern applies to municipalities suffering from delivery deficiencies.

Numerous policy changes aimed at addressing apartheid-era imbalances have been introduce by a succession of ministers since 1994. None of these policies, however pre-emptively increased tertiary education capacity, and often arguably contributed to the current problem.

“Since the ANC assumed power 18 years ago, not one university has been built. Instead, the ruling ANC opted for a reduction of institutions of higher learning through their shortsighted restructuring/merger programme of these institutions early in the 2000s ... (which) led to the closure of approximately 50% of the former colleges of education,” said Rabelani Muthige, president of the Azanian Students’ Convention.

In terms of that policy by 2005 the total of 36 universities and technikons had been  reduced to 23 universities only, with technikons disappearing altogether.

Muthige points out that instead of universities, government built several multi-million-rand “new generation” prisons and a string of multi-billion-rand state-of-the-art soccer stadiums for the 2010 Soccer World Cup spectacle – many now little more than useless white elephants. Mpumalanga province, for instance, has a R2.5bn soccer stadium and no university.

Not enough post-school options

Higher Education South Africa (Hesa), a body led by the 23 university vice-chancellors also said there are not enough post-school options available to school leavers.

“Many such school leavers seek entry into public universities simply due to the limited opportunities available to them for other post-school options in our national education and training system. This growing demand has severely stretched the current capacities of our public universities,” Hesa said in a statement after the UJ-incident.

The incident points to the urgent need for more post-school institutions such as teacher education colleges, further education and training (FET) colleges, agricultural colleges, nursing colleges and universities.

Ironically an article on the website Politicsweb, based on the research of Professor Heribert Adam, and various surveys from the SA Institute of Race Relations show that  the post-1948 National Party government did more for blacks to access tertiary education than any government before or after it.

Between 1958 and 1994 under NP rule black university students (including black, coloured and Indian, with blacks the majority) had increased from 3,819 to 211 280, and nine black universities were built with only Fort Hare having preceded NP-rule.

Progress under Nzimande

Dr Theuns Eloff, vice-chancellor of the University of North-West, told Rapport that the current crisis would continue for several years as the government “slept for 15 years” without spending any money to build new higher education facilities.

Eloff also praised minister Nzimande as the first ANC education minister to make funds available for expansion – R6.3bn for the period 2010 to 2014.

It is also Nzimande who now has to resolve the current mess. Apart from his controversial “central enrolment” proposal, Nzimande’s recently released Green Paper on Post-School Education and Training was largely well-received.

He seeks to undo some of the damage done by his predecessors by massively increasing to four-million the enrolments in further education and training colleges and other non-university institutions – the very institutions his predecessors scrapped.

However, while the building of two new universities in the Northern Cape and Mpumalanga has been on the cards for a considerable time, Nzimande still cannot say when those will become reality. Independent education experts nonetheless believe the country needs a minimum of six new universities to start meeting the demand. It seems nothing less than another Eskom-type rescue operation will be needed.

Stef Terblanche