Cape Town -
The use of race as a proxy for disadvantage is no longer viable, and the University of Cape Town needs to move away from this admissions policy, DA leader Helen Zille said on Monday.
Addressing students as part of DA Student Organisation’s (Daso) election campaign for the upcoming SRC polls, she said race was an especially inappropriate proxy for disadvantage when competing for entrance into university.
Zille did not mention the university’s admissions policy directly, but discussed it briefly in response to questions.
She said there should be a system in place which weighed genuine disadvantage.
She told the story of a woman’s CV which had landed on her desk. She had noticed that the woman had matriculated, with an A in one subject and a C aggregate, from a disadvantaged school in Samora Machel.
Zille had realised that a C aggregate from that school was comparable to an A at Westerford, and encouraged her staff to interview the woman, who now held a top job within the DA.
“I believe the top 5 percent in every school needs to get into a good university.”
Zille said details such as a prospective student’s school, family income and whether he or she had required financial aid to attend a top school should be noted.
She asked students whether they had seen the list of richest people in SA, published in the Sunday Times.
It would be inappropriate for their children to be accepted into a university because they were black without considering the immense privileges they had experienced at the expense of “someone with less melanin”.
“In some cases it is a viable proxy, but in others it is not and needs to be moved away from,” Zille said.
Earlier this year, UCT called for public submissions on its admissions policy, which is being reviewed.
The university uses race as a proxy for classifying students as disadvantaged.
Zille’s response mirrored Daso’s submission, which had said students with a similar background and education should compete on the same terms for a spot at the university. Daso had continued that genuine redress could be achieved by asking applicants for details of the schools they had attended, their parents’ salaries and their parents’ level of post-school education.
At UCT, whites are the largest group, at 36.77 percent, and 21.2 percent are black, 14.6 percent coloured, 6.7 percent Indian and 18.6 percent international, with 2.1 percent of students unknown.
UCT had received 85 submissions, both in support and in opposition of the policy, for review by its commission into student admissions. University spokeswoman Gerda Kruger said the commission hoped to submit its report to the council at the end of October.
Zille called for a changed economy which included all South Africans in its success.
“I do not have all of the answers as to what that new economic consensus should look like. But I do know one thing – so long as our deep, deep inequalities in education still exist, we will never redress the economic injustices of apartheid. It is as simple as that.”
She said that education in SA was so destabilised that it was not surprising that pouring money into it had not improved outcomes.
The DA, through its governance of the Western Cape, already had evidence of what led to improved results, she said: “more time in the classroom, working through the core curriculum with a good textbook in each subject, a focus on literacy and numeracy, and good teachers who are well prepared and on time.”
She said for SA’s economy to grow faster, and more jobs created, education must be fixed.
“If we can succeed… we can forge a new social compact in which no one feels left behind… the wrongs of apartheid are thoroughly and substantively redressed and… opportunity is unconcerned with the colour of a person’s skin,” Zille said.
Cape Times