Varsities ‘facing collapse’
Insourcing, free fees too big a load, USAf warns
IT WILL cost the university sector between R400-million and R2-billion extra expenditure to insource services – and if the country moves in the direction of a feefree regime, some universities will collapse in three months.
This was the stern warning issued by the CEO of Universities South Africa (USAf) Professor Ahmed Bawa, in an interview with Sowetan.
Bawa took over USAf, a body representing the university sector, in May after spending five-and-a-half years as the vice-chancellor of the Durban University of Technology (DUT).
High on the agenda of USAf is the desire to play a more active role in the policy space, instead of responding to policy initiatives by the government.
The organisation plans to do this by coming up with policy proposals for the government to consider. One such proposal the organisation is already working on is a new funding model that it hopes will be the answer to the dire funding challenges facing the sector.
A newly established Funding Strategy Group by the organisation has produced some elements of the proposal that the finance office is working on, and Bawa hopes the organisation will hand over the proposal to the Department of Higher Education and Training and Treasury by the end of the year.
With the dwindling state subsidy forcing universities to stretch what they have to survive, there is also mounting pressure on them to insource workers, which is not going to be a cheap exercise.
“We have done a little calculation which shows that the extra expenditure on insourcing in the university sector is likely to be between R400-million and R2-billion over the next period of time, so that’s going to be an additional burden.
“Max Price [vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town] has indicated that at UCT they are looking at cutting their staff budget to about R100-million.
“UCT might be able to do that but if you take Durban University of Technology, for example, it’s impossible to do that because that university is already so seriously understaffed,” Bawa said.
Bawa said the Funding Strategy Group was working on a completely new funding model.
“We have been talking to the department on a regular basis and our understanding at the moment is that there will be a fee increase in 2017 and that the fee increase is likely to be associated with the CPI [Consumer Price Index]. What that would do in terms of the sector and its stability we are not really sure at the moment,” said Bawa.
President Jacob Zuma established a commission of inquiry into higher education funding, but Bawa said it should rather be looked at as a longer-term project.
“At the same time, I just want to say that if we move into a fee-free regime, the one thing that is completely clear to me is that unless there is some way of ensuring that fee-free component is raised in some other way, universities will simply collapse.
“Most universities will kind of carry on probably for a period of three or four months and after that they will simply collapse. I don’t think there is any easy way out of this ... We are talking about R30billion and unless Treasury comes up with that I just can’t see us moving to fee-free,” he said.