Cape Town - Loafing students who take longer to finish their studies are the main reason that free education is not possible.
Statistician-general Pali Lehohla said free tertiary education would be possible if it were not for university students taking more years to complete their courses than required to.
He delivered the financial statistics of higher education institutions for 2016 and said there was a big backlog of students at institutions.
"If you look at countries like Korea and Switzerland the governments are paying for university, fully. There are 400 000 out of a million that should not be there, they are just sitting there like a cloud. If they were not there it is possible that government could pay for it."
He said since 2012 the input of first year students had been constant but the output had not been.
“They are not moving at a pace they are meant to. Now you need to solve that situation so that you do not have that 400 000 because they clog that system.”
He said the “system is constipated” and solutions were needed to address the problem.
“Something is happening in the system that is trapping students in there, they are not getting out. We are paying for people that should not be there and that is what is making university so expensive.”
He said, currently the country’s 26 higher education institutions get R30 billion in the form of grants, R21.6bn in the form of tuition fees and R15.7bn in the form of donations.
Lehohla said South Africa’s public higher education institutions had a total income from operating activities of R67.4bn.
“This represents an increase of R6.4bn from the income received in the 2015 financial year of R61.0bn.
"The largest contributor to total cash receipts from operating activities for the 2016 financial year was other receipts, R37.3bn, followed by grants which was R30bn.”
In 2016, 975 837 students enrolled in higher education institutions.