POST grills minister on fees
: THE university fee issue is not going to go away. How do you as minister create the balance for both students and universities?
A: This is as much a political question as a technical one and has to be dealt with at a national level, not only by the minister of Higher Education and Training.
The Presidential Commission on Higher Education and Training currently under way is tasked with making recommendations to the president.
Q: As you have said, universities set fees, not you, but the government via President Jacob Zuma set the precedent by ruling there would be no fee increases for 2016. That created expectations going forward. How can you now simply leave it to universities?
A: The decision to implement the 0% fee increase was not a government decision, however, in the interests of the system, the government agreed to the proposal (by Universities South Africa, a body representing universities) and pledged to work with the universities to identify the funds required to support the decision. The responsibility for setting university fees lies with the council of each university, however, given the current climate, everyone recognises that we need to have a negotiated national solution. But at the end of the day universities are the ones who have to implement their fee structures under the current legal dispensation.
Q: Apart from no fee increases, the expectation has been there since 1994, when the ANC promised free education for all. So why, 22 years later, can the ruling party not fulfil that promise?
A: This also needs to be corrected. The ANC has been very clear on what it promised and you can go to the various resolutions of the policy conferences to find what was actually promised. The ANC has not promised free higher education for all. It has, however, promised to progressively introduce free higher education for the poor.
The ANC’s position has always been to meet the constitutional obligation of making higher education “accessible and available”.
The department, and government generally, reads the constitution (and the Freedom Charter) to clearly articulate that basic education, including adult basic education, is a fundamental right and must be provided to all who need it, while further education, which can be interpreted as consisting of HE (university education) and TVET, is a secondary right that must be made available and accessible to those who merit it (meet the academic requirements).
To make further education available is interpreted to mean that the system must grow to provide sufficient spaces for study. To make it accessible means it should be affordable and individuals should not be denied access on the basis of financial need. Access to higher education has also been understood as being about epistemological access to effective academic study. There has been significant investment in foundation provisioning at universities, and a range of related initiatives have been and are being supported, with the aim of improving the success rates of all students, and to address the well-documented “articulation” gap between school and higher education.
These understandings of access and the right to higher education have been the basis for the current policy position of the department and government in general.
It should also noted that various resolutions of the ANC have also pronounced on this issue.
In 2007, the ANC at its 52nd conference resolved to: “Progressively introduce free education for the poor until undergraduate level”.
In 2012, the ANC at its 53nd conference expanded on its earlier pronouncement in 2007 by noting the following:
Academically capable students from poor families should not be expected to pay upfront fees in order to access higher education.
Academically capable students from working-class and lower middle-class families should also be subsidised, with their families providing a household contribution to their studies in proportion to their ability to pay.
The fees to be covered must include tuition, accommodation, food, books, other essential study materials or learning resources and travel; that is, the full cost of study fees.
The upfront fees that are to be provided to enable fee-free university education for the poor and subsidised fees for the working class and lower middle strata should be made available as loans through a strengthened NSFAS (National Student Financial Aid Scheme). Part of the loan should be converted to a bursary for successful students.
The 53rd conference therefore resolved that:
A newly structured national student financial aid system must be introduced to enable fee-free education from 2014 onwards.
A policy dialogue model must be utilised to develop a fully-fledged costing model.
The current NSFAS must be used as a basis for introducing the newly structured scheme.
Consideration must be given to a graduate tax for all graduates from higher education institutions.
Many of these resolutions have already been implemented, as government has consistently worked to expand the system (HE and TVET), find ways to progressively support poor and working class students in higher education, and to widen access through an expanded financial aid scheme.
Q: What have been the failings of NSFAS in this whole process and how can this be remedied?
A: NSFAS has had some administrative difficulties but it would be wrong to say it has failed. It has been highly successful in that since its inception, it has funded more than a million poor students, providing loans and bursaries of approximately R50 billion since its inception as TEFSA in 1994. The challenges of NSFAS are well expressed in the 2010 Ministerial review (available on the DHET website). The current implementation of the student-centred model is designed to deal with many of its challenges. NSFAS is also currently improving its administration and has seconded expertise form the banking sector to assist it.
A further challenge is that since the implementation of the National Credit Act, and the concomitant change in the NSFAS Act, NSFAS’s collection rates on outstanding loans decreased significantly.
Q: In western countries, most students take out loans to fund their tertiary education. But in SA, there has been a large percentage of non-payment of government subsidised loans. So that plan can’t work here. Shouldn’t the government be doing more?
A: The non-payment of NSFAS loans has been directly related to poor collection mechanisms and the changes in the National Credit Act which resulted in the NSFAS Act having to change. However, more recently processes have been put in place to improve on recoveries of loans from NSFAS graduates who are productively employed. It is expected that the recoveries will continue to improve. NSFAS’s collections in the first quarter of this financial year exceeded their target and are expected to improve significantly as new processes are implemented.
Q: With a properly educated population, and with graduates (many from formerly disadvantaged groups) not having to worry about finding money for fees, would this not make for a better country, one where skills and knowledge can make SA a world leader on many fronts?
A: The poor are currently substantially funded to access higher education through NSFAS. The group that we need to assist are the so called ‘missing middle’: children of families who earn too much to be considered for NSFAS, but too little to afford to send their children to universities. We are currently working on a model to extend financial aid to the missing middle, in line with the target mentioned in the National Development Plan. We hope to test the new financial aid model in the 2017 academic year, and to roll it out more fully in the 2018 financial year.
Q: If so, does the government not have an obligation to subsidise students to an ever-greater level, to not only empower them, but create a better, more prosperous society? Surely free or subsidised education is akin to affirmative action and BEE?
A: Higher education is highly subsidised already; poor students are supported through interest free loans and a combination of loans and grants to cover the full cost of study. All other students are subsidised through the university subsidies provided directly to universities to enable them to operate.
Q: With hundreds of millions worth of damage cause by protesting students since 2015, isn’t it clear that the long-terms costs to the country might be higher than what the government would expend in fee subsidies?
A: We need all sectors of society to come out clearly and condemn the destruction of educational facilities. This is in nobody’s interests. A very strong message needs to be sent out that South Africans will not tolerate vandalism. While peaceful protest is a right that we all support and uphold, burning buildings is a criminal offence and perpetrators should be charged.
Q: How will a growingly angry youth help SA, or the ruling ANC for that matter? Should the government not be doing more to appease the youth?
A: We cannot afford to destroy our universities – it will not assist the youth. Appeasing the youth is unlikely to lead to long-term solutions. Dialogue and frank options need to be discussed.
Q: What options are available – would subsidies to universities be increased or decreased?
A: This is the work of the presidential commission.