Declining pass rates
As student numbers have grown, pass rates have declined. In terms of subsidy income, these trends represented a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the more students enrolled, the higher the ‘teaching inputs’; hence the subsidy increases. On the other hand, the fewer students who graduate, or who graduate on time, the lower the ‘teaching outputs’; thus the subsidy decreases. In other words, what universities may make on the inputs, they lose again on the outputs.
So what do institutions tend to do? They exploit this formula by increasing enrolments as much as possible and put pressure on their systems (academic departments, tutorial systems, centres for teaching and learning, etc.) to enhance pass rates. The DHET, in order to demonstrate that it has fulfilled its political mandate to open up access to more and more students, sets sometimes very high targets for enrolment, which some institutions agree to but cannot meet. So to prevent exploitation, government sets ‘caps’ on those enrolments.
Throughput rates – a measure of the time it takes students to graduate – are more difficult to control. Unscrupulous institutions might artificially enhance the pass rates or engage in dubious practices – such as one university that allowed students to write their examinations at home and without monitoring.7 There is just one limitation on these attempts to game the system: the overall funding pie remains constant. This means that to gain more out of the subsidy, an institution must not only do better on its own terms, but also do much better than the other 25 public universities. It is a messy business, but money is in short supply for all of them.
It is, however, very difficult to artificially raise a student’s results, and most universities play by the rules in large part because of the conscience of the academic lecturers. Most pride themselves on their disciplines and the quality of their qualifications. Some disciplines, such as accountancy and medicine, are governed by external examination bodies, and there is the real threat of loss of accreditation if such scams became known. And so, with growing numbers of academically weak students from the school system enrolled at universities, more and more students struggle to master the coursework and the failure rate continues to increase.
Consider the case of Sipho (not his real name), who has visited my office at UFS many times. Sometimes he changes his name in the registry so that he will have another opportunity to plead for one more chance. It is a practice in my office that no student comes through the door unless I see his or her academic record first. This allows for students to be referred to the more appropriate office for assistance, or to prevent repeat calls to the same desk. Sipho’s record indicates that he has failed nearly all his modules two or three times. A rule was created in which a student cannot fail a module more than twice. There are grounds for appeal, and most students are given a third opportunity. If they fail again, they are advised to do the outstanding module through UNISA. But no matter what Sipho is told, he refuses to accept the verdict of the various offices of appeal. He is desperate, and no amount of tutoring and special assistance and multiple opportunities can help him. But he will not take no for an answer.
I have seen hundreds of Siphos in my seven years at the helm of UFS. Every time my administrator’s heart beaks. A careful reading of an academic record as a historical document will suggest one of two things: either Sipho should never have been admitted to university, given his matriculation certificate, or Sipho will never pass at a university level even if his original school certificate qualified him for tertiary studies.
Few university leaders understand that difficult transition from school to university better than Sizwe Mabizela, the vice-chancellor of Rhodes University. A kind-hearted man with boundless empathy for students, he once headed the quality assurance body that sets the standards for school-leaving certificates.
Sizwe Mabizela: What is actually happening and has been happening for a long time is that universities are receiving more and more students who are unprepared for higher education. And if you look at the performance of our public higher education system, the dropout rates are frightening. In fact, almost half of the young people who enrol at our public higher education institutions leave the system without a qualification of one kind or another. That, of course, is a colossal waste of human potential, and the reason why they’re in that predicament is that there aren’t any viable, attractive post-school education and training opportunities except university.
I’ve argued on a number of occasions that this country does not need more people with university degrees. What this country desperately needs at its level of development are more young people with artisanal skills. One can pour in money to deal with the funding of higher education. But that in and of itself will not make the significant difference, because you have young people in a public higher education system who should not have been there in the first place, who would have benefited by going to a TVET college. Unfortunately, those colleges are not institutions of choice at the moment. And so as part of resolving the challenges of higher education, we need to pay greater attention to our TVET colleges. Make them institutions of choice.
I’ve also made a lot of noise about the message that we send with our National Senior Certificates (NSCs): it is very problematic when you classify an NSC as a certificate, diploma, or bachelor pass. A bachelor pass sends the message that the person should go to university, and so anyone with a bachelor pass, which unfortunately does not take much to achieve, simply thinks of university. I wish we would change that classification so that some of those with a pass that is equivalent to a bachelor pass could see themselves going to a TVET college because that’s what would appeal to them.
The other thing that is very important relates to the curriculum in our higher education institutions. It is one thing to facilitate physical access to a university; it is quite another to facilitate what Wally Morrow [the late South African philosopher of education] refers to as ‘epistemological access’. That means access to knowledge, what knowledge is and how you construct knowledge, and all of that. We have succeeded in facilitating physical access, but I don’t think we have been that successful in facilitating access to knowledge. And that, of course, is reflected in the dropout rate that I referred to earlier.
If I had my way as far as higher education is concerned, I would cap the numbers and say no more growth, and if there is growth it has to be very small and controlled, and that we must pay attention to what is happening within the universities. Improve the pass and graduation rates. Improve the throughput rate. Those are absolutely abysmal, which is one of those things fuelling #FeesMustFall. You have young people who are frustrated, who come from poor families, and they just can’t make sense of what is happening at universities. They drop out in large numbers and that’s a mix that leads to incredible levels of frustration.
This frustration on the part of students is real, and university principals encounter it all the time, sometimes with dangerous consequences. For example, at UFS Sibusiso (not his real name), having once again failed his course, angrily confronted his lecturer. He threatened to get physical and started to throw things around in her office. She was mortified. When she told him the results were accurate, he called her a racist. She offered to refer his plea higher up. Eventually it reached my office. After a thorough review, I told him that multiple failures after repeated opportunities and assistance meant that he would not be able to pass the course. Sibusiso then threatened the lecturer’s life on social media. (An investigation revealed that he was the perpetrator, working from an off-campus site.) Personal security arrangements were made for the lecturer, and Sibusiso was expelled. Nevertheless he has found his way into the protest marches on campus. His intense frustration and anger mix in with the protest about student fees, helping to facilitate the addition of all kinds of other agendas onto the list of protestor demands – including accusations of racist lecturers and individual targeting. The real truth about Sibusiso’s case melts seamlessly into the heat of the protests.
Tuition fee hikes
As subsidies have come down, tuition fees have gone up. From 2000 to 2012, the government’s contribution to higher education decreased from