WINNING nations invest in their people to improve their capacity to produce and apply knowledge. South Africa is an ambitious nation, but not yet a winning one.
By 2025 Nigeria will surpass South Africa to become the largest economy on the continent. Already South Africa’s lead in ICT connectivity is being eroded by countries in North Africa. Part of the explanation of South Africa’s diminishing position is the poor performance of its higher education and innovation systems.
The capacity and quality of these need urgent improvement.
The first step towards a cure is recognising that the quality and productivity of the higher education and innovation system does not meet our expectations.
We have a Kilimanjaro to climb over the next 20 years. We have no alternative but to improve quality and productivity to ensure that our ambitions become reality.
The proposed national development plan published by the National Planning Commission recognises early learning and schooling as the foundation of higher education and national innovation. It makes a number of proposals to fix our schooling system.
These include investment in early childhood development and intervening during the critical stages of a child’s development; a national commitment by all stakeholders to collaborate to improve education; mobilisation of resources in the private sector, NGOs, universities and other government departments to support underperforming schools; addressing teachers’ pay structure; and the ongoing training of teachers and principals.
It is critical that we lay these strong foundations if we are to solve the challenges we face in higher education, where our performance compares badly with other upper middle-income countries.
Only 17 percent of young people between the ages of 20 and 24 enrol in higher education.
Although this is higher than the average for sub-Saharan Africa of 6 percent, it is lower than the norm for upper middle-income countries of 30 percent.
The combined research output of all universities in South Africa of 8 200 publications a year is less than one university in Brazil – the University of Sao Paolo has a research output of 9 000.
Only 34 percent of South Africa’s academics have doctorates, compared with an average of 75 percent for the 400 top-ranked universities in the world.
We produce only 28 doctorates a million a year compared with 569 in Portugal, 288 in the UK and 187 in South Korea.
Why should we be concerned about the performance of our universities?
In today’s world, the knowledge and information system is vital for development, innovation and competitiveness.
Universities play a pivotal role in shaping the future of any nation. For example, 10 Asean nations have “put education at the centre”, with higher education recognised as a vital tool to stimulate economic growth.
Universities educate and train people with high-level skills to meet the needs of the public and private sectors, and produce cutting-edge professionals who drive the development of new knowledge and innovation.
Universities create new knowledge, critique information and find new local and global applications for existing knowledge.
They shape the ethics and philosophy underpinning a nation’s knowledge capital. Universities also provide opportunities for social mobility and strengthen good citizenry, equity, social justice and democracy. The university as an institution of society has played a central role in shaping civilisations and the development of humankind throughout history. That is why its quality and productivity matter so much.
The problems in the performance of our higher education system result from a combination of inadequately qualified academic staff and the underperformance of the schooling system, which means many students enter university with a weak skills base.
This is the result of accumulated disadvantage. For example, our Grade 5 pupils in historically black schools perform considerably worse on average in numeracy and literacy tests than Grade 3 pupils in historically white schools.
Pupils need a good foundation in early childhood education and development.
To qualify and participate successfully in higher education and enter the innovation system, they need access to good schooling, with English, their mother tongue (if not English), maths and science at the core.
However, universities no longer have a monopoly on knowledge production globally.
Other organisations, such as science councils, non-governmental and privately funded research institutes, state-owned enterprises, the private sector, and even some government departments, have become sites of new knowledge production and application.
Government, higher education, the national system of innovation and private industry need a shared vision of the future.
A greater understanding within government is also required to acknowledge the importance of science and technology and higher education in leading and shaping the future of modern nations.
Government departments need to work together to develop a broad enabling framework and policy that encourages world-class research and innovation.
More importantly, we need a new framework in which the knowledge and information systems operate, and their relationship to innovation and industry need to be configured.
In higher education, the plan proposes ambitious targets to raise the production of doctoral graduates from the current 1 400 to more than 5 000 a year; increasing participation rates to more than 30 percent and increasing graduation rates from 15 percent to more than 25 percent.
This would involve increasing the number of graduates a year from 167 000 (including private higher education institutions’ contribution) to 425 000.
The plan identifies one of the most important steps for achieving this as being to improve the proportion of academic staff holding PhDs from the current level of 34 percent to 75 percent over the next 20 years.
Acting upon these proposals will put in place a strong foundation for a winning South Africa. Complementary actions will need to be undertaken in further education and training.
The focus should initially be on achieving modest expansion while improving quality, and later, accelerated expansion in the participation rate of the age cohort from 6 percent, or 300 000 students, to 25 percent, or 1.25 million students.
By 2030, an additional one million learning opportunities a year should have been created for post-school workers and the unemployed.
This is necessary to ensure that universities alone are not burdened with the responsibility of producing high-level skills. Other sites of knowledge production, such as science councils, state-owned enterprises, non-governmental organisations and the private sector will have to play their part.
Winning nations invest in their people to improve their capacity to produce and apply knowledge.
n Professor Makgoba, Dr Molwantwa and Professor Rensburg are commissioners of the National Planning Commission