South African Higher Education Landscape

The current South African economic climate is one of slow growth combined with competing and indispensable demands on the state budget to address urgent social needs. This is evidenced by debilitating poverty, high unemployment and inequality. South Africa has one of the highest Gini Coefficients in the world, ranking the nation as the most unequal globally in terms of access to wealth and resource distribution[1].

Higher education policies and priorities of government in the post-apartheid years have focused on redress of past inequalities.  Transformation of the system is needed to ensure increased access to higher education, the production of skilled graduates, and research for the knowledge requirements for socioeconomic advancement of the country.

There are about 1 million registered students at 26 public universities in South Africa[2]. This is a significant increase from under 600 000 in the year 2000, access to higher education is expanding, particularly for Black African students. Black African students accounted for under 60% of total headcount enrolment in 2000. In 2015, the percentage representation of Black African students rose slightly above 70%. Although such access is expanding, participation rates remain relatively low particularly for Black African and Coloured population groups. The gains made by expansion of access is to an extent neutralised by the poor academic performance of many such students in the sector.  Only about 25% students graduate in regulation time at national level. It is estimated in the sector that about 55% of each cohort of intake will never graduate[3]. This necessitates the need for public higher education institutions in the country to develop innovative academic development strategies for ensuring that expansion of access to higher education is complemented with requisite student success in order to achieve intended human capacity development of the country.

The change of demographic composition of staff at public higher education institutions as an aspect of the broader call for transformation is slow.  The sector is still overwhelmingly dominated by white males. Even as the representation of the Black African population group rose from 19.3% in 2000 to 44.6% in 2015, this reflects a serious under-representation, given that Black Africans account for about 80% of the total population of South Africa. The white population group that accounts for under 10% of the population comprised 60% of academic staff of universities in 2015. At Rhodes University, of the 105 Professors/Associate Professors in 2017, 17 (16 %) are Black and only 07 (7%) are Black women. There is still much work to be done to improve the equity profile of academic and administrative staff in the University. Given the further challenge of the ageing staff profile, there is an urgent and pressing need to build the next generation of academics, and especially black and women academics.

Funding, particularly state subsidies is an important enabler of the operations of public higher education institutions.  During the period 2006 to 2015 government Grants/Subsidies to public higher education institutions increased by 144%, an increase even beyond the rate of increase of the State’s tax revenues. However, state subsidies have not kept pace with inflation and the growth in student numbers. The inevitable result was that during the period 2007 to 2014 student fees increased by more than the inflation rate as universities struggled to balance their budgets. By 2015 South Africa’s university tuition fees comprised 34% of total university budgets. This situation was clearly not sustainable and was the primary cause of the student #FEEs MUST FALL crises in 2015. This culminated in the zero percent fee increase for the 2016 academic year and the restriction of an 8% maximum fee to students with a family income of above R600 000 per annum in 2017. The extent of reliance on tuition fees differs widely between the universities. In 2015 Rhodes University was the second most-dependent university on the tuition fees in South Africa[4].

In spite of the above challenges facing the higher education sector, the government of South Africa in the current national development plan (NDP-2030) set out aspiring development targets for the university sector by 2030, including increasing headcount enrolment from the current 1 million students to over 1.6 million, increasing annual graduation rates to more than 25%, and increasing participation rates for university enrolment to more than 30%, amongst other targets[5]  

Rhodes University is committed to contributing to the human capacity development aspirations of government through a number of strategies. These focus particularly on transformation of the institution and increased access and support of academically qualifying students from previously under-represented sectors of South African society.

Last Modified: Wed, 13 Mar 2019 09:24:13 SAST