Why SA’s colleges are missing all the marks
• They should be the answer to unemployment and economic woes but instead they often drain resources
Anumber sums up the parlous state of our country’s vocational training system: 2%. A mere 2% of students entering technical and vocational education and training (TVET) colleges qualify in the minimum period of three years. Barely a third graduate and many of those who do, wait years for their certificates.
How many of them get jobs is unknown because the government does not track their progress.
These colleges should be the answer to the country’s twin problems of youth unemployment — which stands at more than 50% — and an artisan shortage, which has resulted in companies importing welders and carpenters from as far away as China and the Philippines.
The government has been pouring money into the system. It will spend R6.92bn on the 50 public TVET colleges in 2017 and the allocation will rise to R8.59bn by 2019.
The vast majority of students secure bursaries from the government-funded National Student Financial Aid Scheme that they do not have to repay. The government is therefore getting a poor return on its money, which continues to be disbursed regardless of the performance of colleges.
Many colleges are out of touch with the needs of industry and few are staffed by lecturers with appropriate teaching and technical skills and industry experience.
The merger of 152 small technical colleges into 50 TVET colleges in 2002, along with the demand to increase student numbers and to implement new curriculums, has placed a huge strain on their management structures, which have often proved unequal to the task.
“One student told me they are learning how to use fax machines in business studies,” says DA spokeswoman for higher education and training Belinda Bozzoli.
“Many students are simply being kept off the streets. Their hopes and dreams are being shattered,” she says.
TVET colleges offer two streams of study.
National certificate vocational (NCV) courses span three years, are pegged at level four on the National Qualifications Framework and include theory and practical work.
N courses are a series of six courses, each lasting three months, pitched at levels two to five on the qualifications framework. Students require additional practical experience to get their N diplomas.
A recent performance and expenditure review commissioned by the Treasury lays bare some of the colleges’ failings. It found the average throughput rate in NCV courses in 2013 ranged from a dismal 0.6% in civil engineering to 5.9% in tourism; the national certification rate was just 32.5% for firstyear students and the dropout rate was 28.2%.
A similarly bleak picture emerged from a study published by the Swiss-South African Cooperation Initiative. It found that 33 of every 100 students who enrolled for these courses passed their first year, 15 passed their second year and six graduated on schedule.
Volker Wedekind, from the University of the Witwatersrand’s school of education, says school pupils often get poor career advice and enrol for courses in which they have little interest or aptitude, a major contributor to the poor pass rate.
Schools encourage weaker students to enrol at TVET colleges before matric to push up pass rates. Some enrol for technical courses, such as tooling and engineering, that require a grasp of maths and physics beyond the capabilities of school dropouts, he says.
The extensive delays some students face in getting their certificates highlight the managerial problems in the sector.
“Students can wait two or three years. It’s unconscionable,” says Wedekind. But he cautions against characterising the entire sector as flawed, saying that education quality varies widely between and within campuses.
The Department of Higher Education and Training’s deputy director-general for planning and monitoring, Firoz Patel, concedes that TVET colleges are largely unaccountable for their performance, but insists that change is coming.
As it stands, TVET colleges get funding regardless of their pass rates or whether graduates get jobs.
“We are building a new system. Accountability measures are being put in place. The auditor-general will report on all 50 TVET colleges this year and we are starting to verify enrolment numbers,” says Patel.
The litmus test for the colleges is the extent to which they supply the skills needed in the economy and improve young people’s prospects of finding decent work. Data is sketchy, but what little there is indicates they are failing dismally. The government’s most recent scarce-skills list, which the Department of Home Affairs uses to determine who gets work visas includes carpenters, joiners, boiler makers and electricians — exactly the kind of skills expected from students attending vocational colleges.
Their failure to produce enough technicians and artisans has repercussions for industry and society: Chinese construction company CBMI Construction, for example, recently imported welders from China, invoking the ire of Cosatu, which organised a march on Cape Town’s docks.
Statistics SA’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey also raises a red flag. A surprisingly large proportion of the TVET college graduates who do find jobs are not working in industry, but in finance or the government, notes Vijay Reddy, executive director of the Education and Skills Development research programme at the Human Sciences Research Council.
The most recent survey, for the last quarter of 2016, shows a quarter of employed TVET college graduates work in “community and social services”, which are largely government jobs, and a similar proportion work in finance. A mere 4.3% work in mining, 7.7% in transport and 8.8% in construction.
Many college graduates are hobbled by their lack of work experience, says Swiss-South African Co-operation Initiative CEO Ken Duncan.
“While NCV course curricula recommend work experience, none actually require it and so most students never get it.
“A few do have much better job prospects, not because they have different or better technical skills, but due to their contact with a prospective employer,” Duncan says.
The low regard that employers have for NCV qualifications is apparent in graduates’ employment rates.
“Grade 12 leavers have a 50% chance of getting a job, exactly the same as those with an NCV qualification without work experience,” says Duncan, citing a tracer study published by the initiative in 2015.
Most of the NCV graduates who did find jobs were working part-time and earning less than R3,000 a month, the study found.
Students who opt for N courses often battle to get apprenticeships. However, after they have their qualifications, their odds of finding work are significantly improved, Duncan says.
Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande rightly emphasises the importance of TVET colleges because he recognises the need for a strong vocational sector to absorb tens of thousands of school leavers who apply for university courses they have no hope of passing, says Duncan.
“The ongoing shortage of intermediate and artisanal skills is hampering economic growth and can only be addressed through the sector; universities don’t train welders and electricians,” he says.
“The challenge Nzimande faces is to improve the quality of TVET at the public colleges at the same time as he expands access – a very difficult thing to do,” says Duncan.
Nzimande is a long way off from meeting a target set in the National Development Plan (NDP) to ramp up the number of students enrolled at TVET colleges to 2.5-million by 2030, from 710,500 currently.
Unlike countries with strong vocational training, such as Germany, SA has more school leavers enrolled at universities (1-million) than at the colleges, a ratio the NDP says should be flipped around.
“The sector has to be set to rights to supply the skills that are needed for the economy,” says Reddy.
“I don’t think anybody would say the return on investment is commensurate with what the government is putting in.”
COLLEGES GET FUNDING REGARDLESS OF THEIR PASS RATES OR WHETHER GRADUATES GET JOBS