The dream deferred: A critical look at higher education post-celebration

Amid national fanfare and celebration, the release of the National Senior Certificate examination results last month was rightly greeted with collective pride.

Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube describes the “moment” as an important culmination of an arduous decade-long journey. She is correct. It is indeed a moment for looking back and recognising the achievements of pupils, teachers and parents and, just as she importantly states, for taking stock of the health of South Africa’s basic education system.

Yet education cannot be sustained on distinct moments alone. It is not a sequence of brilliant extended episodes frozen in time, but an unfolding continuum, a long, conjoined arc. To reduce it, however unwittingly, to delinked snapshots fractures its purpose and imperil the very dreams it exists to nurture.

Almost immediately, the next “moment” looms. As the post-school education and training system shifts into gear, thousands of hopeful pupils turn their gaze towards universities and colleges. Many deserving candidates, about 220,000 from more than 900,000 who sat for the exams, will indeed find places in higher education institutions. The number includes 600,000 successful National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) applicants, nearly 70% of all applications for 2026.

But many will not. Thousands could join the ever-increasing number of South Africans who are not in employment, education and training.

Academic merit alone no longer guarantees access. Infrastructure and institutional capacity are formidable barriers. The National Development Plan’s target of 1.6 million university enrolments by 2030 appears increasingly elusive. In 2025, just more than 202,000 first-time entering students were admitted to public universities, less than 60% of the 337,000 who achieved bachelor’s passes and under 2% of the total matric cohort.

NSFAS acting CEO Waseem Carrim’s assurance that “all necessary steps” will be taken to prevent funding hiccups in 2026 is welcome. Yet universities would be reckless not to prepare for less-than ideal scenarios. Recent history offers little comfort. The mixed fortunes that awaited the “lucky” 202,000 entrants of 2025, and indeed cohorts from 2023 and 2024, must not be allowed to repeat themselves.

For many young South Africans today the pursuit of a university degree no longer reliably leads to improved life chances. Instead, it too often delivers crushing debt, mental distress and, in some cases, gender-based violence and crime, rather than the sustainability of families and communities.

By 2025, student debt exceeded R9-billion, much of it carried by households already dependent on social grants. One in five students experiences a mental disorder. Suicidal thoughts and behaviours have become distressingly common, with suicide now among the leading causes of death for young people. These are not peripheral concerns, they go to the heart of what education is meant to achieve.

In such circumstances, how does education remain “the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”, as Nelson Mandela famously declared? How does it continue to serve as an engine of economic development and human advancement?

Too often, these questions are left to universities alone to answer, perhaps understandably, but ultimately unfairly. Their complexity, interdependence and deep social embeddedness defy single-dimension solutions and resist treatment as isolated “moments” in a young person’s life.

The consequences are by now grimly familiar. Each academic year begins with higher education institutions becoming theatres of distress: violent protests due to accommodation shortages and delays in payments of NSFAS allowances, abuse and stark displays of poverty. Vice-chancellors emerge as convenient scapegoats for systemic failures not of their making, frozen in the glare of yet another “moment”.

As admission offers are issued and hopes rise, students and families place their faith in a funding and access and onboarding value chain that has too often faltered. University admissions processes are structured and orderly, shaped by institutional infrastructure and teaching capacity. Yet desperate “walk-ins” still arrive unannounced, travelling long distances on one-way taxi rides or lifts, hoping to be “first in the queue” for successful access.

Many arrive with luggage and nowhere to sleep, dropped off at campuses as the only points of reference they know. Financial aid decisions, critical to access, onboarding and success, have tended to follow timelines misaligned with admissions and academic programme cycles.

Within this fragmented educational value chain, universities are compelled to make far-reaching financial decisions, including concessions and limited emergency relief, based on little more than faith. They do so under immense social justice pressure because, once students arrive at their gates, society effectively vests them with in loco parentis responsibilities, whether or not the capacity to fulfil that mandate exists.

The limits are stark. Nelson Mandela University, for example, serves about 33,000 students but has only 5,340 on-campus beds. In 2025 alone it received more than fourfold accommodation applications. The arithmetic is unforgiving.

The result is predictable and tragic. Destitute students from deep rural villages and farms, many from grant-dependent households, end up in unsafe neighbourhoods and in unsuitable accommodation, susceptible to crime. Some are unable even to attend classes consistently because they lack funds for transport. The culture shock of arriving alone in an unfamiliar city compounds their vulnerability.

Even when financial aid is approved, funding shortfalls caused by capped subsidies and payment disruptions persist. For students entirely dependent on financial aid for tuition, accommodation and basic living expenses, such delays can be deleterious on academic success.

As frustration mounts over obstacles beyond their control, opportunists seize the moment. Vice-chancellors become the face of an amorphous, system-wide failure. Universities, often misunderstood as wealthy corporate entities, are in fact heavily regulated, governed through complex internal and external arrangements, and shaped by powerful organised interests and social partners. Many operate on wafer-thin reserves, strained further by declining government subsidies.

Then the spiral accelerates. Protests turn ugly. Infrastructure burns. The academic project stalls. Law enforcement arrives. Social media outrage erupts. Reputational damage deepens, driving away vital third-stream income. Families who can afford alternatives quietly exit the system, and institutional decline feeds on itself.

At the height of the crisis, leaders, oversight bodies and civil society descend on campuses for ex post facto inspections, often amid media spectacles. After a day or two, they leave, until the next moment. What, then, becomes of Mandela’s optimism about education’s transformative power? What do these moments contribute to democratic nation-building or the repair of South Africa’s deepening inequality?

Good intentions, massification of higher education included, may gesture towards social justice, but only intellectual capacity gives them substance. Failure to educate our young is not the deferral of dreams. It is rather steady accumulation of future costs – broken institutions, blighted futures, deepened inequality – for which posterity will pay dearly.

A more pressing question, then, is no longer whether the system can endure these moments, but whether the country can endure their consequences.

Quo vadis, South Africa? DM

Luzuko Jacobs is the senior director at Nelson Mandela University. He writes in his personal capacity.