The Higher Education Funding Crisis

8 September 2016

Everybody agrees that the government has messed up on the funding of Higher Education

Even Minister Nzimande acknowledged to our Committee recently that it was a mistake to expand the system so rapidly without sufficient funding.  Now that everybody agrees, what next?

We estimate that the system at present only receives half the funding it really needs. 

We have a million students crammed into 26 underfunded Universities; half of them never complete their degrees; and most of them can’t afford to pay the fees which the Universities need to charge to close the gap. 

How cruel to lift the hopes and dreams of a million young people while making it so difficult for them to ever be attained.

So who should pay the missing funds which have resulted from this unholy mess?

- It is obvious that the students can’t pay

- The private sector can and should assist, but it is unlikely that they will do so at the scale required – which is in the billions

- We know now that the Universities can’t pay – we are already seeing them going into deficit. 

That leaves only one candidate: the Government. 

President Zuma’s hapless outfit of losers and dubious characters, in fact, must pay.

It is a hard truth but there it is. Only the state can afford to provide the core funding for a quality Higher Education system. Why is this so hard to accept? We accept that schooling must be state funded, and we continue to fund schooling generously, in spite of its severe weaknesses, and its massive drop-out rate. 

But when it comes to Higher Education the Treasury doors are closed. Increases are at, or below, inflation. Real costs are not taken into account. Expansion is done on a shoestring. Ever greater burdens are placed upon the system without money to pay for them.

And the very notion of Higher education is derided. Our President sneers at what he calls “clever blacks”. Graduates are told they have “wasted” or“useless” degrees. The myth persists that graduate unemployment is high whereas it is only at 5%. And so on. 

We indulge this anti-intellectualism at our peril.  It reveals us to be a small-minded society without a real vision for a developed future. 

We sneer at the system that produces our doctors, nurses, teachers, accountants, engineers, scientists, artists, poets, writers, musicians, historians and economists. How immature we are as a society to do this to such a precious resource. 

And let’s turn to the future. 

If further, sustained and adequate funding is not invested by the state in Higher Education our Universities face a miserable future. Here’s how things will unfold. 

The first thing to go will be infrastructure. It’s the obvious candidate for the first round of cuts. Universities will cut down on maintenance – which they are already forced to do; new projects will be put on hold; and physical decay will set in. Student accommodation will deteriorate and fail to expand; lecture facilities will become shabby; laboratories and research facilities will become dated; libraries and electronic subscriptions will become under-resourced and old; and IT systems will stagnate.

The second thing to go will be the top academics. Many are already looking for jobs elsewhere as  the future is looking increasingly  unstable. The top academics are internationally mobile and will quickly find jobs elsewhere. 

The third thing to go will be top administrators. Universities are vast enterprises with budgets in the billions. But who wants to lead and manage a sinking ship? We will see University management  become the domain of failed government bureaucrats with little experience of actual academic life and a low level of commitment to the idea of a University per se.

Over time classes will get even bigger as staff are cut. The best and most mobile staff will move on, leaving the more mediocre to do all the teaching in even larger and more unwieldy classes than those which already plague the system.

Then the top students will start exiting the system. This has already begun. Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and top Australian Universities are already recruiting amongst our matric students, and offering them full scholarships. Others will go to private local Colleges. 

The fee-paying students have the ability to pay for other options. They will and this will only leave universities with less income.

As the fees base shrinks, the vicious downward spiral will speed up, with income down, classes growing, top academics and students leaving, and infrastructure shabby and dated. 

This is what people mean when they say that our Universities will simply become colleges – places where mediocre undergraduate degrees are taught by mediocre staff, mainly to the poor who have no other options, where post-graduate study is increasingly difficult to sustain, and where research cannot seriously be undertaken because infrastructure and quality staff and students are just not available. 

This situation is imminent due to the chronic underfunding by the ANC over the last two decades. The downward spiral has already begun and  it won’t take many more years for it to unravel if a solution is not found.

The DA was able to identify R2.7 billion in the 2016/17 budget which could have been transferred to assist poor students while also giving universities enough subsidies so they can pay their bills. Yet the ANC blocked this proposal, making it hard to believe that they are serious about finding solutions to this crisis. 

- In our submission to the Commission of Inquiry into Higher Education and Training, we proposed that: The poorest students should be comprehensively supported;

- The “missing middle” students should receive support, proportional to their financial standing;

- Better-off students should not receive government financial support for fees or other expenses;

University subsidies should move gradually towards the level of 50% of costs to a) support quality education, and b) minimize the fee-increase cycle we are currently experiencing. 

We are privileged to have Universities that compete with the top 2% in the world. This is a great achievement for a middle-income country. There are many areas of excellence that we can be extremely proud of. 

Do we throw all this away now? 

We are on the brink of doing so. 

While SAA has lost us R11bn in the past two years alone, and is continually and irrationally bailed out, a million students and 26 struggling institutions remain underfunded and subjected, at the most, to unsatisfactory short-term solutions. 

They remain at the mercy of the state which seems to believe that this crisis will somehow go away. It won’t. 

President Zuma and his floundering, bickering, anti-intellectual government, has abandoned our precious higher education system, our national assets and our young people, the future of this country.

With the proper political will and financial priorities we can find a solution to the fee crisis plaguing South Africa. We call upon the President to find sufficient long-term funding to stabilise our Universities, and to find it fast.

Thank you. 

Issued by Belinda Bozzoli, DA Shadow Minister of Higher Education and Training, 8 September 2016