Zuma must address zero fees issue

Students supporting the #FeesMustFall campaign meet on the Graca Lawns at UCT. Picture: Jeffrey Abrahams

Students supporting the #FeesMustFall campaign meet on the Graca Lawns at UCT. Picture: Jeffrey Abrahams

Published Feb 7, 2016

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Just a few kilometres from Parliament, 5 000 #FeesMustFall protesters are expected to march on Thursday evening to the Grand Parade in Cape Town as President Jacob Zuma delivers his State of the Nation address.

The R4.6 billion he announced the government would put towards the zero fee in-crease for this year and to cover the debts of students who would otherwise be unable to re-register for university - along with the commission he said would investigate the broader issues of transformation of campuses and free education for all who qualify - have not entirely stilled the students’ demands.

It is unlikely anything Zuma could say will do so, but with the students camped on Parliament’s doorstep, he cannot ignore the subject.

Emeritus Professor Ian Scott of UCT’s Centre for Higher Education Development said it was important to remember that the additional funding was just a temporary fix.

Unless something changed, the cost base of universities would continue to exceed the available funding into the future, compounded by inflation, which was higher than ordinary consumer inflation because, among other reasons, many of the materials and books required had to be im

ported.

Meeting the demand for free education for all students who qualified academically for university entrance was way beyond the government’s means, especially in the current depressed economic climate.

Also, there were arguably more important priorities, within the education sector.

South Africa had more university students than those in technical and vocational education training colleges and the new community colleges, but this was an inversion of the ideal scenario in which each university graduate should be supported by a number of technically skilled professionals.

The Higher Education and Training Department was trying to expand the Technical Vocational Education and Training system, but there was social resistance to this as most people aspired to a university degree.

This was because there was a big gap in status between blue- and white-collar workers in this country, compared to Australia, for example, where many blue-collar workers earned more than their graduate compatriots.

The department was also trying to revive the artisan system, discarded in the 1990s, but “people will not be interested in it if it’s seen as a second-class option, and that has been in the public mind for a very long time”.

Covering the funding needs of universities and the student aid system would require a paradigm shift, Scott said.

One option, creating a credit market for student loans by offering government guarantees on the loans for students who couldn’t offer their own collateral, was not as simple as it sounded.

 

“A credit market for students, particularly students who are now called the missing middle (those who don’t qualify for National Student Financial Aid Scheme funding but can’t afford university on their own), is not commercially at-tractive because it’s expensive for students, first of all, and then there’s the matter of security, collateral, etc,” said Scott.

If the government offered guarantees to entice banks to enter this market it would inevitably have to pay out on a proportion of this in non-recoverable loans, and nobody had costed such an exercise.

“There is no free lunch, unless we find a radically different system,” Scott said.

Another issue no one wanted to discuss in the heat of the #FeesMustFall campaign was the very low rate of students entering university who ultimately graduated, which stood at about 50 percent.

“What people are fighting for is an opportunity to have a 50 percent chance of succeeding. Of course, it is the very students who require financial aid who generally have the least effective schooling, and therefore come in at a disadvantage and have a very much higher probability of not succeeding than the wealthier segments.

“It does seem to follow socio-economic lines with depressing regularity,” Scott said.

“My big concern is that in all of this debate we are not talking about how well this money is being used. It’s a major issue.

“If we are losing 50 percent of our students, there’s a very high proportion of our subsidy and our aid scheme money that is not productive.”

Zuma should call for society to pool its intellectual resources for ways to leverage other forms of financial assistance, “particularly through an enlightened loan scheme, bigger than NSFAS, which could make a difference to the country”.

Sunday Tribune

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