Underfunding at heart of crisis
OPEN LETTER to the Minister of Higher Education Blade Nzimande and the Minister of Finance, Pravin Gordhan:
Our youth are our country’s future, yet many academically capable young people continue to struggle to access or complete tertiary education due to financial barriers.
As university staff and students, we witness with distress and frustration the difficulties our economically disadvantaged students have to go through to secure funding to pay for their university studies.
As academics and support staff, their struggle is ours too.
We want to give of our best to provide our students with quality education, to do research and community engagement, and to provide a much-needed stable and supportive learning environment.
Our country’s economy needs graduates who can solve our many challenges. Transformation of our higher education institutions requires human and financial resources.
Operating under evertighter financial constraints, we will soon reach the point where we can no longer do this important work.
Therefore, we urge the government and private sector to provide the necessary funding to ensure that quality public higher education is accessible and affordable to all academically capable young people.
The constitution states that: Everyone has a right to further education which the state, through reasonable measures, must make progressively available and accessible.”
The decline in state funding of public higher education over the years has led to unaffordable levels of increase in student fees. This has made tertiary education increasingly inaccessible and unaffordable.
Welcome steps have been announced regarding fee adjustments for 2017 to relieve the financial burden for low- and middle-income families.
We hope this signals our government s medium- to long-term commitment to address the challenges of accessibility and affordability of public higher education and the chronic underfunding of the system.
We also urge stakeholders in the private sector, themselves beneficiaries of public higher education, to materially commit to finding long-term funding solutions for our system.