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Report lifts lid on financial aid scheme

March 17, 2010 in Education, Financial Aid, South Africa | No comments

Blade Nzimande

The Department of Higher Education could soon instruct the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) to stop deducting money from past beneficiaries of the scheme without their consent.

Currently past students who owe NSFAS and who are now working are having their salaries deducted by employers without their consent and the money is paid straight to the scheme.

But a ministerial committee tasked to review NSFAS on Tuesday released its much-awaited report that is set to bring drastic changes in student funding. It also demands NSFAS to remove all students it has black listed on credit bureaus.

The committee, led by professor Marcus Balintulo has also recommended changes to the policy, regulations and operational framework of the NSFAS to allow the scheme to absorb more needy student who wished to further their education.

It says the Minister of Education Blade Nzimande should on constitutional, legal and moral grounds instruct NSFAS to immediately stop all loan recoveries from past students without their consent and refrain from using this method in its dept recovery practice.

NSFAS is a state-funded initiative formed in 2000 to assist financially needy students enter institutions of higher education.

The scheme replaced Tertiary Education Funds of South Africa (TEFSA) which was formed in 1991.In 2005, the scheme awarded R1.2 billion to financially needy students who wished to further their studies.

The committee, which spent more than eight months reviewing the scheme, has further recommended the investigating the introduction of a constitutionally compliant section of the NSFAS Act to enable NSFAS to recover loan repayments directly through the taxation system.

It wants government to revalue the NSFAS loan book to assess the accuracy of the R10 billion valuation and that the revaluations should be done timeously to allow the minister to report any adjustment to parliament prior to the financial year end.


“The committee also recommends that NSFAS should not blacklist students with credit bureaus and should remove the names of all students currently black listed with the TransUnion ITC credit bureau and or any other credit bureaus,” said the report.

Speaking later to BuaNews Nzimande said while he was not expecting Cabinet to agree all the recommendations saying “we will be presenting our case”.
“I don’t want to preempt a discussion in Cabinet, all we would like to do to the best of our ability is to present a compelling case,” Nzimande said.

He affirmed that while the report touched on many issues, not all of them can be solved in a short period of time.

“We have to go to Cabinet and say what is it that we think its feasible but that we want to increase access to poor students is non-negotiable”.

The panel has also recommended that government investigate whether to expand the categories of students admitted to universities, to include people with work experience and no matric, and end the criteria of using race as major criteria to award financial assistance to students.

Research has shown that only between 12 and 15 percent of black and coloured students gain entrance to higher education and only about five percent graduate. There is also evidence that some white students had been refused assistance even though some may have proved to be financially needy.

Nzimande slammed universities who were still demanding NSFAS students to pay registration fees in cash despite a directive from his predecessor Naledi Pandor urging universities to rather deduct the money from the scheme.

“It’s nice to talk about the parental responsibility versus state responsibility when you can afford. But the reality is that most students cannot afford these registration fees and some are from families with no bread winner at all,” he said.

The recommendations will be released for public comment.

“We want the country to engage on especially the stakeholders; many of them have participated in the process and were already interviewed. We’re talking students, academics, university management, workers and what the committee is saying is that the report has benefited immensely from the comments of the stakeholders,” Nzimande said.

The minister conceded that while the recommendations may require a major financial injection into the scheme and the higher education sector in general, a consideration needed to be made as to where the line should be drawn between state responsibility and that of parents.
NSFAS has provided study loans an estimated 250 000 students. The scheme fund receives about R2.1-billion a year from the government. -

Source: BuaNews, nsfas.co.za,

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Top university tackles transformation in South Africa

February 9, 2010 in Education, South Africa, University | No comments

The University of Cape Town (UCT), one of South Africa’s top institutions, is undertaking an ambitious programme to balance race relations on campus. The university is accelerating its pace of transformation in the light of a government-commissioned probe into racism in higher education. “The report forced universities to think about these issues and to respond, which is what its real benefit has been,” said Crain Soudien, chair of the committee that oversaw the investigation and head of the transformation programme at UCT.


The investigation, launched in March 2008 following a racist scandal at the University of the Free State, exposed pervasive racial and sexual discrimination at university campuses across the country, and the failure of institutions to confront these challenges.

The subsequent report, based on questionnaires and visits to the country’s 23 universities, provides a range of key recommendations that universities are expected to adopt to varying degrees. They will be expected to talk about what steps they have taken at a conference to be held later this year.


Soudien, a professor of education at UCT, said both black and white racism occur quite predictably at the nation’s higher education institutions, although generally not on the same scale as the Free State incident. “Race relations continue to be a problem,” said Soudien. “The ongoing transition we face is extraordinarily difficult.”

A key finding of the report is that institutions have complied with national legislation and drafted policies to deal with racial integration, but that these have in most cases not been put into practice. “The response to the new legislative platform is largely one of compliance,” said Soudien. “With this report we’re trying to get universities to think about what this platform is truly about.”

The report did draw criticism. The official opposition Democratic Alliance released a statement accusing the committee of providing impractical recommendations by not grasping the funding crunch plaguing universities. But the party did acknowledge that it raised legitimate concerns about racism at various levels in universities.

The report’s recommendations fall into four categories: curriculum, student life, governance and institutional climate.

UCT has, for the moment, chosen to focus on institutional climate, which looks at staff relations. It has so far tackled the issue by circulating two sets of surveys, which polled staff members on whether they feel fairly treated by the university and their colleagues. It also launched the Kahuluma programme, a series of two- and three-day workshops that look at the relationships between staff members.

But, like any programme of this nature, there are challenges to overcome. The surveys are not representative, with low return rates of 30%. Soudien said many people see transformation initiatives as tedious and as an administrative burden.

“I think our challenge as leadership in a university is to help people see what a real opportunity this is to getting down to business,” said Soudien. “With global issues such as climate change and sustainability, this is an important moment in thinking about our responsibility as producers of knowledge around the world.”


One recommendation affecting many universities is the issue of governance. The report revealed that university councils in particular are not providing adequate leadership to their institutions, largely due to limited leadership capacity.

One result of many decades of apartheid is that the number of black people with university experience is considerably less than their white counterparts, which means many of the people serving on the councils are not necessarily qualified.

But for UCT, issues around governance are less of a problem than at other universities. Soudien said historically UCT has had a very active council, with council members deeply involved in policy issues and able to anticipate questions surrounding issues of racial integration.

“We’re leading by example,” said Soudien. “Other universities have started to look at what we’ve done here.”

Other universities have also been making strides. Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University is launching a center for the advancement of non-racialism and democracy, for instance, and the University of the Free State last year appointed its first black Vice Chancellor, Professor Jonathan Jansen.

But UCT believes it is the leader in crafting policies around racism, sexual harassment, and the integration of residences. It has also developed an admissions policy that uses race-based criteria when admitting students. “The policy recognises the need for redressing the difficulties and injustices that arose from the past,” said Soudien.

But the policy is contentious. Opponents have argued that in a post-racial society, with race no longer on the statute books, disadvantage not race should be the qualifying factor.

“The position we’ve taken is that we’re looking at the vestiges of ongoing effects of racism in the lives of young people,” said Soudien. “But we do want to get to a point where race isn’t in the admissions criteria, so that we can recognise other forms of disadvantage in young people.”


It’s not only staff members taking up the issue. UCT’s Student Representative Council has undertaken a campaign to draw attention to and encourage racial integration on campus. The campaign is aimed at getting young people to question whether or not they are racially integrated, and whether their inter-racial interactions are on a meaningful or a superficial level.

“We decided this year that we wanted to look beyond UCT and speak to broader societal issues,” said Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, SRC president and a third year politics, philosophy and economics major. “We felt young South Africans weren’t thinking about racial integration so it was the first issue we wanted to address.”


The campaign will have an aggressive run in the first two weeks of the academic year, which is just starting, and is centered on specific projects, using UCT media to promote the cause. Students will arrive in February to posters strewn across campus and to artistic constructions relating to racial integration erected in Jameson Plaza, the main social meeting ground for students and hub of campus life. The SRC will also organise screenings pertinent to the issue of race and arrange for diversity workshops for students.

“This campaign is absolutely necessary,” said Mpofu-Walsh, who calls himself black and white, being the product of mixed race parents. “We saw what could happen with the Free State incident, and we didn’t want that to happen at UCT.”


South African tertiary institutions face a particularly tough challenge in recreating their identity in a post-racial sphere. There are very few universities worldwide that have come out of an unequal and divided past, leaving institutions here without a model to serve as a guide.

But for Soudien, thinking of transformation issues presents educators with a valuable opportunity. “We have the chance to imagine this university in a new space and time,” he said. “It’s exciting and so stimulating. It’s a privilege to be a part of the process.”

Source: universityworldnews.com, mediaclubsouthafrica.co.za, pacific.edu, academic.sun.ac.za, monash.ac.za

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New directions for higher education in South Africa

February 5, 2010 in Education, South Africa | No comments

One of Dr Blade Nzimande’s first moves as South Africa’s new Minister of Higher Education and Training was to institute a review of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, a step that heralded his concern with ongoing inequalities in the system and his intention to widen access to higher education for the country’s poorest, mainly black students. It was also a sign that he intends to honour the African National Congress’ election manifesto commitment to begin the process of providing free undergraduate study to financially needy students.

As Secretary General of the South African Communist Party, Nzimande is no stranger to being guided by political ideology and his discourse frequently reflects his revolutionary roots and his keen sense of a constituency.

To delegates at a December 2009 South African Students’ Congress (Sasco) gathering, Nzimande described the higher education and training system as a reflection of “deeply interrelated contradictions of class, race and gender”, as well as “a key terrain” upon which to confront these contradictions.

Dr Blade Nzimande

Political rhetoric aside, Nzimande’s knowledge of this “key terrain” is not to be under-estimated. He has played a significant role in reshaping the apartheid-era education system, starting with his work in the late 1980s and early 1990s at the Education Policy Unit based at the then University of Natal. After the first democratic elections in 1994, Nzimande moved to Parliament where he was head of the select committee on education.

Now at the helm of a new department which amalgamates the government’s entire skills development function together with universities, universities of technology and vocationally-oriented further education and training (FET) colleges, Nzimande says his core mandate is to create a “coherent but diverse and differentiated post-school education and training programme” anchored within the framework of a newly-adopted national human resource development strategy (HRD-SA) administered by his department.

Significant expansion of the post-school sector is on the cards to cater for the 2.8 million or more 18 to 24-year-olds which research funded by the Ford Foundation shows are neither employed nor in any formal education or training programmes.

While Nzimande sees access to universities increasing to some extent, most of the growth is set to happen in the FET sector, although the creation of new universities in Mpumalanga and Northern Cape is also on the cards. In recent weeks, Nzimande has said he expects enrolment in the country’s 50 FET colleges to double in the next five years and institutional audits are planned for all of them, aimed at improving quality.

“Universities are only one of the post-school education and training options,” he said on 13 January, shortly after the announcement of the 2009 school-leaving examination results, which saw a disappointing 2% decline in the overall pass rate. “We believe that colleges must become institutions of choice and will play a critical role in preparing young people for economic participation.”

Despite the emphasis on growing and improving FET colleges, ministerial adviser John Pampallis said universities remain “very important”, particularly in terms of their role in expanding opportunities for the higher education sector as a whole. He told University World News the department would be looking at ways to help universities to improve their throughput rates.

Since assuming office over eight months ago, however, Nzimande’s major focus on universities has tended towards issues of equity and transformation. Transformation of these institutions is “non-negotiable”, he says, and concepts of academic freedom and institutional autonomy cannot be used to frustrate transformation.

A higher education summit is planned for April, at which the idea of a transformation monitoring group will be mooted. Pampallis said the summit would take a wide-ranging look at transformation, focusing not only on issues of equity and discrimination but also on governance and curriculum development.

The minister is also concerned, he said, about the poor performance of university institutional forums mandated by the Higher Education Act of 1997 to advise university councils on a range of issues relating mainly to transformation.

The focus on equity has been noted by Dr Nico Cloete, Director of the Centre for Higher Education Transformation (Chet), a non-governmental organisation aimed at increasing transformation management skills in higher education.

Cloete said he is concerned by what he called the department’s “back-to-1994″ approach, which largely conceived of higher education as a tool for redress rather than as a critical agent for development.

“Rather than talking about national development and the positive role of higher education in development, they are seeing higher education merely as an instrument for achieving equity and democracy,” he said.

Cloete said there had been very little encouragement for and support of the activities of successful research-led universities. “What [the minister] is not talking about is research at top-end universities. Rather, these institutions get criticised for not admitting enough black, poor students and for not being democratic enough,” he said.

Compared with his predecessor Naledi Pandor, Nzimande’s approach to transformation is a matter of emphasis rather than principle, according to Pampallis. “His tenure comes in the wake of the Soudien report and he [Nzimande] has a different political history and constituency,” he said.

Commissioned by Pandor and published in May last year – the same month as Nzimande’s appointment as minister – the so-called Soudien report, prompted by a racist incident at the University of the Free State and produced by a committee chaired by University of Cape Town education professor Crain Soudien, exposed the persistence of racism and other discrimination on South African campuses. The new minister had little option but to take the matter further.

Naledi Pandor

But Nzimande’s concern with access and participation rates is also evident in his proposal for a central applications system for higher education institutions and he has indicated he intends to meet with a range of professional bodies to talk about how to improve the numbers of black students entering professions such as accountancy and engineering.

In the face of some fears of a centralising tendency emanating from the ministry, Pampallis said there would be no day-to-day interference in the running of institutions and government’s main instrument for influencing universities would likely be funding. “It’s the minister’s job to intervene, but it will be largely at the level of policy and there will be engagement with vice-chancellors and stakeholders,” he said.

Pampallis admitted that Nzimande’s SACP ties raised fears from certain quarters. This was evident when, amid concern from the official opposition Democratic Alliance, the minister announced his intention to review the current higher education funding formula, which he said perpetuates “apartheid-type inequalities in higher education”, maintaining privilege in some institutions and keeping others perpetually disadvantaged.

But such thorough-going changes require people with expertise. For Cloete, a question mark hangs over the department’s overall capacity to execute what is clearly a highly ambitious reform-oriented agenda, particularly in the wake of a recent exodus of senior staff.

“The minister is moving towards redress and enormous expansion of the sector, but he’s put together a department without the skills or experience to support these plans,” he said.

Cloete said this shortage of senior-level skills could frustrate the department’s ambitions to steer the sector by means of a new funding formula. “As soon as you move away from standard formulas, you need capacity to implement and review these procedures. Increased steering, for example, could be seen to pose a threat to autonomy but it could also constitute a threat to the capacity to steer.”

Double-edged swords notwithstanding, higher education watchers are in for an interesting ride over the next four years.

Source: universityworldnews.com, info.gov.za

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Education a parental responsibility

January 22, 2010 in Education, South Africa | No comments

Mpumalanga MEC for Education - Reginah Mhaule

Mpumalanga MEC for Education, Reginah Mhaule, has urged parents to take a direct interest in their children’s education.

Mhaule visited Magashule Primary School and Shanke Secondary School in Oakley trust in Bushbuckridge on Wednesday to mark the start of the 2010 school year.

“Parents please take an interest in your children’s education. The education of children is a collaborative endeavour, and it therefore requires all of us to rally side by side to attain a positive outcome,” she said.


Mhaule said the early distribution of stationery would enable teachers and learners to “get straight to the business of teaching and learning” on their first day.

She promised that the department would do everything possible to ensure that the school year proceeded smoothly.

“I want to assure the provincial community that we will do everything we can to free our schools from underperformance and dysfunctionality,” she said.

Mhaule said she was impressed by the mood among teachers and pupils at the two schools.

“I am excited by the high level of enthusiasm from teachers and learners alike. If the positive energy that I saw today can be sustained, there will be good things to come from our schools,” said Mhaule.

Magashule Primary School’s acting deputy principal, Anastacia Magagula, said the school was proud to have been the first school visited by Mhaule.

“It feels good that on our first day at school the MEC came and prayed with us. She also motivated the pupils when she told them that she used to teach at this very school in the 1980s,” said Magagula.

Shanke High School’s principal, Henry Dube, said the visit had been an inspiration because it was the first time that such high-profile people had come to the school.

He said the school was proud of the fact that the Deputy Minister of Communications, Dina Pule, matriculated at the school in 1984.

Source: BuaNews

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High returns from post-school education

January 12, 2010 in Education, South Africa | No comments

South Africans who obtain a degree earn on average between 2.5 and four times more than people who do not complete schooling, the first major study on the returns of post-school education has revealed. Degree-holders are also three times more likely to get a job – in a country where more than one in four people are unemployed.

The primary message from the research is for South Africa to improve post-secondary school education participation because there is a dramatic reduction in young people not in employment, education or training – 2.8 million people between the ages of 18 and 24 years – as the level of education improves.

“The ‘worst’ thing that can happen to a student is to drop out of school between grades 10 and 12,” the research found.

The study by Nicola Branson, Murray Leibrandt and Tia Linda Zuze of the South African Labour and Development Research Unit, show hugely positive returns from tertiary education that increased between 2000 and 2007.

The findings are outlined in a report, Responding to the Educational Needs of Post-School Youth, published by the Centre for Higher Education in Cape Town and edited by its Director Professor Nico Cloete.

Drawing on figures from sources including Statistics South Africa and the Department of Education, the study looked at level of education categorised as degree, certificate- diploma, school-leaving certificate (‘matric’) and incomplete schooling. It assessed the effect education level had on employment and on earnings, against having incomplete schooling.

The study found that people with a matric were between 30% and 60% more likely to have a job than those who had not finished school. In 2000, people with a tertiary education were twice as likely to be formally employed than individuals with less than matric. “By 2007 this had increased to around three times.”

The study found that people who successfully complete school earn on average between 40% and 70% more than those with less schooling. The return from obtaining a diploma or certificate is between 170% and 220%.

“The average individual with a degree is rewarded with between 250% and 400% higher earnings than counterparts who did not complete matric. There is thus an incremental increase in rate of return for higher education levels,” said the report. The two provinces with the highest returns were the Western Cape and Gauteng.

In 2007, for example, 25-year-old non-unionised African employees in the Western Cape who had a matric earned on average R1,900 (US$253) a month while those with a certificate or diploma earned R3,600 and those with a degree earned R6,300. There are substantial gender differences: in 2007, a woman in this group with a diploma earned R980 a month less than a male and a woman with a degree earned R1,700 less.

Further, while the return for a qualification remained fairly stable over time for a person with a matric, a diploma or certificate, it increased over time for a graduate. In 2000, a graduate earned a salary 320% higher than an individual with less than a matric – and by 2007 this difference had increased to more than 370%.

The report said that earlier research at the University of Cape Town had greatly overstated graduate unemployment at 100,000 people. This had led, among other things, to the National Treasury restricting the expansion of higher education.

In fact, the graduate unemployment statistics for 2007 were 15,745 people comprising just over 11,100 jobless people with degrees, nearly 2,500 with postgraduate diplomas, some 1,700 with honours degrees, and 420 with masters or PhDs.

“Of concern is that graduate unemployment doubled between 2001 and 2007,” the report stated. But a key finding was that obtaining a post-school qualification “dramatically improves a student’s opportunity to become employed or self-employed”.

Still, the study concluded, the increasing returns from post-school education in terms of finding a job and higher education showed the growing importance of studying further.

At a seminar on the Post-School Youth report, hosted by CHET in Johannesburg last month, participants pointed out there were significant racial discrepancies in educational returns. Many white and Indian graduates access jobs through social networks and environments, and so the returns from university are higher for some than for others; there is also a socio-economic bias against African graduates in terms of earnings and the ability to find work in the area in which they studied.

These factors are a missing element in the study. Nico Cloete described the ‘returns’ study “a first shot at this area”. There were discrepancies in information across databases, he added, and the next job was to clean up the data and probe the statistics further.

Source: universityworldnews.com, chet.org.za, jghs.edin.sch.uk, friends-of-modern-africa.org, internationaleducationmedia.com, powc.co.za

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