Daily Dispatch

Student funds need quick fix

LAST year, our higher education institutions were consumed by protests as the demand for a free tertiary education gained momentum.

It is estimated that about R1-billion damage was caused to infrastructure. Damage to the sector itself has been inestimable.

The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) may well provide the only protection against the possibility of further anarchy this year.

The protective veil it provides will be a diaphanous one, but it is better than nothing. It offers students who had zero hope of getting a higher education an opportunity to do so.

For the so-called missing middle, it will also, to some extent, remove the sting of discovering that the education they had hoped for proves to be simply unaffordable after registration fees are paid.

For this reason, those administering the NSFAS cannot afford to drop the ball.

Managing these much-needed funds should run like clockwork – if not, the barely buried grievances of 2016 may well rise again and further destabilise an already fragile higher education sector.

In the past, management of the fund has been poor. The funds managed by the NSFAS have increased substantially from R441-million in 1999 to about R15.2-billion in 2017.

It is estimated about 405 000 students will benefit from NSFAS funding this year.

Unfortunately, for the first 16 years of its life, the funding model barely changed, despite some shocking findings in 2010 about its administration.

Following a ministerial review, recommendations were made on how it could be improved.

But it is only now, following months of violent protest, that Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande has implemented some of those changes.

These include amending the means test to include the “missing middle” (those students previously considered too well off to be eligible for NSFAS funding, but too poor for other alternatives).

Better late than never. But, most important, the NSFAS has promised to pay registration fees upfront for all students so that there will be no hindrance to accessing their chosen institution.

About R1.3-billion has been made available for this alone.

This should have allowed a seamless registration and admission of all NSFAS students at all 26 higher education institutions nationwide.

But the NSFAS has already dropped the ball. As universities begin registration, many of the students and universities have yet to be informed about who will receive funding.

This has already stalled registration at two Eastern Cape institutions, Rhodes and Walter Sisulu universities.

No surprises that this has also raised the ire of #FeesMustFall activists, and the rumblings may gain momentum if the issue is not speedily resolved.

The NSFAS management has promised to speak out next week on 2017 financial aid statistics.

We can only hope that by then the teething problems will have been resolved and that we can look forward to seamless registration and a peaceful academic year. We have already seen the alternative, and it is not pretty.