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SA’s education crisis: We need to stop lying to our youth

De Vos is a director with strategic consultancy QED Solutions.

Universities are not just about getting young people a marketable education. Government funding is not just about student numbers, it is also about undertaking post-graduate research, and making it available to others by publishing authoritative and peer-reviewed research. Indeed, the focus on money, here and elsewhere, creates a risk that the real purpose of the university is getting lost.

#FeesMustFall will fall – that’s a pity because through their various campaigns they raised important issues, and not many of them have been solved. Who can forget the Occupy (Wall Street) movement and its associated Occupy/1% associated movements? Supported by the public, they captured significant media attention for a good number of weeks in 2011, it does not exist anymore and you cannot say that the issues they raised have gone away.

The Occupy movements united in their disgust of financial capitalism and the 1% that did the rest of us in. Their anger was directed at the corruption of politics by money, the concentration of wealth and power and, yes, the debt burden of university students. But in building the movement, they rejected traditional route of building an organisation with set policies and tried to create a “leaderless” movement in favour of a participatory democracy with general assemblies, working groups and decision making by consensus. The effort was reject the existing political order to set up something entirely new. But the movement eventually blew itself out. Some would say that the motivation of the supporters of the occupy movement was not about rejecting the promises of “the system”, rather that they felt cheated of those promises. Perhaps a more traditionally organised movement would have been more effective in fixing the problems that first brought people together.

The parallels with the various bit of the #MustFall movement are clear. As the universities are now on a long summer break, being able to keep momentum looks impossible. By definition, university students have to move up and on. What has been achieved so far? Merely a promise to keep fee increases to zero and some type of commitment by government to make up the shortfall. Apparently, there is some type of movement on insourcing workers as well. The fundamental problems have not gone away.

What we have seen though is quite a bit of anti-social behaviour insults and assaults along with destruction of university property. A number of other issues have been dragged in including racial, syllabus/knowledge systems transformation, the anti-colonisation effort and other issues like addressing white privilege and so on. No doubt all of these issues are important, albeit in different weightings by different people according their personal points of view. There are solemn undertakings to deal with all these issues too but from the outside, it all looks like a tangled mess.

From the outside it seems, that mostly it is about the lack of money. And there is a certain comfort to that because how to fund higher education or the students in higher education is a problem in many advanced democracies. We are not alone in this. When the public purse has other competing and very urgent demands, the very notion that university education should be free is absurd. Education of any type confers numerous benefit to society as a whole. This is not uncontested. Economist Ricardo Hausmann and a former Mbeki government advisor says the benefits are a myth. Be that as it may, education also confers benefits to the individual being educated. The problem is that the social benefits are highest at primary and secondary levels and only then only at the higher education level. The benefits to the individual work in the opposite direction. Individuals with higher education secure substantial benefits of the investment made for themselves. We can see some of this when looking at unemployment figures. Depending on how you categorise along the lines of race, gender or age and several other factors, graduate unemployment is a relatively small figure, and although others take issue on an anecdotal “lived experience” of the importance of race and class it does not take away from the picture. At worst, young graduates have an unemployment rate that seldom goes above 10% and after the age of 30, it is seldom above 5%. Due to high labour market participation (there are very few discouraged job seekers), there is a small difference between narrow and broad definitions of unemployment. Graduates also get paid much better. Compare this to our overall unemployment of over 25% on the narrow definition and over 35% on a broad definition. Among the youth generally, one estimate, using a broad definition of unemployment, places it at 63%.

Seen only in this way, our universities are doing a fabulous job, and their degrees confer not only economic benefits, but considerable status. The rash of fake academic credentials strongly suggests as much. Universities take in first year students at one end and pop out middle class people on the other end. That might explain why for those getting excluded from this fabulous outcome for financial reasons is a very, very serious problem. Of course that might over-state the position. Universities are not just about getting young people a marketable education. Government funding is not just about student numbers, it is also about undertaking post-graduate research and making it available to others by publishing authoritative and peer-reviewed research. Indeed, the focus on money, here and elsewhere, creates a real risk that the real purpose of the university is getting lost.

William Deresiewicz, in his book entitled “Excellent Sheep” seeks to defend the humanities or liberal-arts from a financial cost benefit analysis and is superbly reviewed here. We are making a bad mistake, he argues if it is all about transferring marketable skills in which utility becomes the sole criterion of worth. For example, here is a pitch for studying philosophy over journalism. The book, Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa, put together by Professor John Higgins, explores some of the same issues. The foreword to that book, written by JM Coetzee, makes for pretty bleak reading about the future of higher education.

That being said, let us look at some of the numbers. The Democratic Alliance’s shadow minister for higher education, Belinda Bazzoli, says that direct government funding comprises 40% of total income, down from 50% 20 years ago, and fees which used to comprise 20% of total funding are up to 30%. She also says that government subsidies represent about R17, 000 per student currently enrolled, which means that tuition fees are on average R22, 000, which excludes any living expenses, books and other necessary expenses. Eek out at R3,000 a month and it costs a student a minimum of R50,000 a year to attend a university a year, include the government subsidy and other university income, and the total funding for that student is easily R80,000 a year, and much more at our best universities. Over a four year degree, the cost of producing a middle class taxpayer is between R300,000 – R500,000. Jayson Croomer, @RollingAlpha, put an easy-to-understand piece together about how Wits and the University of Cape Town are run. The way that the government subsidy works is a complicated formula made more complex by the fact that all universities are subject to the same formula. Funding increases if there is more STEM subjects but it has to take account of historical disadvantaged institutions. In general the tuition fees paid by students is roughly matched by a government grant. At present levels, Income from derived from students is split roughly equally between the government and tuition fees.

Are the costs sketched out above value for money? On the face of it, absolutely. If the chronically chaotic National National Student Financial Aid Scheme could be sorted out, there are different ways that funding could be made available. One could even tweak it so that richer parents pay more. There are limits to this as the university has to remain a value proposition. As the vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State, Jonathan Jansen, said in a lecture entitled “A quiet contemplation on the new anger” parents who can afford it, can send their children elsewhere for higher education and this is becoming increasingly possible. In the future, it will be even more so. But the “deal” described above does not exist in real terms. Spending R80,000 is worthwhile if the bet pays off, but a terrible one if it does not. Funding is really beside the point; it is all about whether the student succeeds in getting the qualification.

The Council for Higher Education tracks throughput of students starting degrees who complete their degrees within the allotted time or at all. The carnage of those who drop out before they complete their degrees is simply unbelievable. Around 50% who enrol come out with nothing, just the accumulated debt. In modern South African parlance, we are not giving our students a higher education, this is simply a higher education opportunity. What we are doing is akin to sending young people to the roulette table to put all their (borrowed) funds on either black or red. It is crazy. It is little wonder that one hears the chant “I can’t breathe”. It is also little wonder that there is the demand for changes to the curriculum. Half of our students can’t cope with the subject matter that they are expected to master at university.

The anger ought not to be surprising since prospective university students have beaten “the odds”. According to Nic Spaull, of the 100 students that started school in 2003, only 48 wrote matric in 2014, 36 passed and 14 qualified to go to university. Spaull says that most of our children do not even get a look in, as 80% of our schools are “dysfunctional. The vast majority of those who do enrol at higher education come from the “functional part”, and those that make it through the dysfunctional part must be exceptional. But half of this cohort is not making it at university. Even those with every advantage struggle with the step-up. This points to a wider dysfunction in the functional part of our secondary education system. Sure, analytic and problem solving skills needed to succeed at university can help with the matric exam, but rote learning and prepared answers to predictable questions gets you just as far. In fact, bringing too much problem-solving ability into our matric exams probably just gets in the way. To use an analogy, universities want candidates with the ability of a Roger Federer, but they get those who excel only at bouncing a tennis ball on the court instead.

Universities cannot fix the problem of our schooling system. They are just not set up for it. We should also stop lying to our youth because being young, they take the promises adults make at face value. Massively expanding access to universities is not going solve anything. An unfulfilled promise means nothing, but unpayable debt is a recipe for disillusionment and anger. Make no mistake, our universities whether because of political pressure or with an eye on government funding measured by student intake, are complicit in this ruse.

There has to be another way. Fixing the schooling system is obviously needed, and needed not just to make tertiary education work. But that is a huge task, and we cannot wait around for that to happen. Surely applied disciplines, the ones that provide skills that are in demand do not have to be provided just by universities that also do research? Surely there is an opportunity for universities with solid programmes to accredit other institutions without the overhead to provide their courses? Perhaps we should link students with realistic opportunities that add the most value at the lowest risk and then provide multiple opportunities to extend/enhance the qualifications later? What can technology solve? Perhaps getting the private sector more involved in setting up differentiated institutions and rating their efforts as President Barack Obama has suggested for United States colleges, might provide students who do not know what they want to do, or how much they are likely to earn with better information.

All of these suggestions have come under criticism, not least the free market ideology that underpins them, but what we have now is unsustainable, and we risk destroying whatever excellence exists at our universities including their vital role in pointing out that society and social activity cannot be reduced to the value that might be ascribed to them by markets a cost/benefit analysis. These suggestions and more are covered in 2013 Task Team lead by Professor Njabulo Ndebele, that makes the case for a flexible undergraduate curriculum structure.

Early next year we will see yet another year of hopeful first year applicants queueing up for places at universities, a significant portion of which are made up of those excluded for both academic and financial reasons. It is completely unjust and we all know it. DM

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