Poor students still excluded
IN previous years prior to the announcement of free education and the Fees Must Fall campaign poor students were excluded, based on finances.
They could not afford to pay the university fees and NSFAS always accommodated a certain number of poor students, but due to its small budget could not accommodate all poor students.
Now that there is free education for the poor, most universities in South Africa have increased their admission point score (APS).
The sad thing about this sudden move by the universities is that this will continue to exclude all the poor students coming from the quartile one to three schools because the academic performance from these schools is not outstanding but average.
You find that many students from these schools have an average that ranges between 50% and 60%, but now it seems like universities are only planning to accommodate the students who performed outstandingly and not those who performed averagely in their matric results.
Students from these schools always struggle to pass the access assessment test because the level of English that is used in that test is too high for those students who come from poor schools.
All the careers classified as scarce skills will no longer be accessible to students from poor schools, hence now you will see poor black students moving in large numbers to do BA degrees and find themselves unemployed after graduating.
For example, teaching is a scarce skill in South Africa. To study teaching at Nelson Mandela University you need to have 38 APS points which is an average of 70% and this is too much for those are coming from poor schools.
There will be now influx of poor students to TVET colleges and universities of technology.
It seems like now that there is free education for the poor students, universities know that there will be high number of students coming in and the only way to control that is through APS because only few poor students will again access to the universities.
Universities need to be accommodative and assist in building the future of poor students, not to exclude them.