Higher Education: Saving the “missing middle”

Currently only students from households earning less than R120,000 a year qualify for support from the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS). That threshold, which has not moved in years, excludes the children of nurses, teachers, police officials, clerks and other working and lower middle-class families.

This quagmire was one of the issues during last year’s #FeesMustFall protests, as were long-standing and deep-seated grievances over the administration of NSFAS by universities and university of technology level. Each NSFAS student is meant to get R72,000 a year, but there are reports of universities spreading allocations to larger numbers, thus negating the impact of financial support. Claims of mismanagement and corruption are now the subject of an official investigation, running alongside a commission of inquiry into tertiary education funding. The reports are expected towards the end of the year.

Nzimande and his team are not unaware of this missing middle quandary.

“Part of the problem are the large sections of children whose parents are from highly-indebted working and middle-class… This is a reflection of the distressed working class,” he said at Thursday’s pre-budget vote briefing. Access to higher education should be part of the social wage, but instead it was a pressure point.

In fact, official concerns over the missing middle date back to 2009 when NSFAS was first asked to look into redressing the missing middle, and do more to raise additional funds. It seems matters only got moving late last year when former banker Sizwe Nxasana was appointed to head the scheme. The brief the minister gave him is wide, but includes looking into raising the threshold, fund-raising additional billions of rand, removing the NSFAS system from higher education institutions to make it student-focused, and also cracking the whip on aid beneficiaries who are dodging their repayments.

Speaking at a Gordon Institute of Business Science-hosted conference earlier this year, Nxasana indicated that the new possible NSFAS qualifying threshold could be R500,000 by 2018, according to BDlive.

It should be easy to do this, right? Not quite, it emerged on Thursday. Nzimande and his Director-General Gwebinkundla Qonde indicated to Daily Maverick a wholesale legislative review was needed, involving also the trade and industry department and the National Treasury. So it wasn’t a simple case of enacting a ministerial proclamation. However, higher education officials want to implement a new NSFAS pilot scheme from 2017 with the new system permanently in place for the 2018 academic year.

The government takes pride in highlighting numbers and how it beats its own targets, like producing 8,000 more artisans than planned last year through the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges. The number of NSFAS students has increased from 28,260 in 1994 to 173,885 in 2015, according to a recent parliamentary reply, which also shows another 235,446 NSFAS-funded students attended TVET colleges in 2015, up from 12,283 in 2007. Similarly, NSFAS funds have increased in real terms in just one year: 47% to R4.57-billion in 2016.

The numbers are indeed up, but the picture is far more complex and shadowed by the persistent racial inequalities which impact on tertiary education in different ways. Policy interventions to date appear to have had a questionable impact in the focus on numbers and meeting targets, without necessarily considering quality or real impact.

Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) this week released its social profile of the country’s youth between 2009 to 2014, which showed a stark drop in bachelor degree completion rates among black African and coloured students since the mid-1990s. This effectively brought about a 2% drop of professional, managerial and technically-skilled black Africans aged 25 to 34 over the past 20 years, leaving them less educated than their parents. And the StatsSA report reinforced the co-relation between education and employment: 57% of those without matric are unemployed, 38% of those with matric and 1% of graduates.

Yet black students who make it to universities are proportionally a relatively small group, which had to beat the odds. Research on basic education has shown only about half of those who start Grade 1 actually complete Grade 12. Of the roughly 800,000 Class of 2015, only 166,263, or 36.4%, qualified to go on to universities. According to an official breakdown of the matric passes, white students on average obtain university entrance passes, but only a comparatively small number of African black students do.

At university level the drop-out rate on average stands at about 50%. According to a 2012 study of NSFAS students conducted by the University of Stellenbosch (cited in a recent parliamentary reply) only 34% of first-year students coming to varsity in 2000 completed their undergraduate studies, 37% had dropped out and 29% were still studying. Drop-out rates for non-NSFAS funded students were higher. But for those funded students dropping out comes at a heavy cost: “NSFAS has 247,913 active debtor students. These students have repaid R1.8-billion with an outstanding debt of R4.7-billion,” the parliamentary reply said.

There is various research on the persistently high university drop-out rate dating back to at least 2007, when the Human Science Research Council conducted a study, and as recently as 2013 when the Council for Higher Education Transformation (CHET) conducted its survey. Over the years, there has been no significant change, although the higher education department says it has put various programmes in place to support first-year and other students. Now NSFAS is conducting its own detailed research covering the period of 2005 to 2014, expected at the end of June.

On Thursday Nzimande acknowledged the drop-out rate was a concern. “It’s of no use to expand the provision of funding without addressing this (the drop-out rate) because it’s a waste of money.”

Predictably, ANC MPs during Thursday’s higher education budget vote focused on the 47% year-on-year increase in NSFAS allocations for 2016 and the numbers game. In this hall of mirrors reflecting self-congratulation, there was little consideration of the impact. The need for fundamental structural reform to qualitatively address the legacies of apartheid inequality appeared lost. DM

Photo: Students from the University of Cape Town (UCT) protest in Rondebosch, Cape Town, South Africa 20 October 2015. EPA/NIC BOTHMA