Last month the department of higher education and training released a Draft Policy for the Recognition of South African Higher Education Institutional Types. In the main, the policy seeks to articulate more sharply the three different types of higher education institutions that SA has, as advanced by the amended Higher Education Act of 1997.
These are higher education colleges, university colleges and universities. The department argues that through this policy, it would finally be able to have a far more comprehensive higher education system that responds to the socioeconomic needs of our society.
In other words, our tertiary education system would provide flexible and targeted programmes that would equip the youth with the relevant skills to find work and engage more productively with our democratic landscape.
The draft policy has ambitious targets that I think will at first require a heavy hand to fix a few things with our higher education environment before its objectives can be realised.
We have three big problems with our higher education system. First, there is what I call a “research university nationalism” that has captured the imagination of all role players in the system including government regarding their understanding of what a tertiary education sector is.
Notions of excellence, quality higher education, efficiency, sustainability, and market-relatedness in post-schooling education are all associated and perceived according to a research university model.
Institutions of higher learning are not considered legitimate, excellent and sustainable unless they act and look like Rhodes, UCT, Wits and Stellenbosch.
The staff and leadership within them must also resemble a traditional professoriate that is globally respected for launching books and journal articles with Western publishers – even if nobody reads them in Africa to obtain relevant knowledge to address our own local problems.
This model of higher education is deeply entrenched in the psychosocial imagination of higher education, and it has a huge political economy created around it to sustain itself and exclude others.
Vice-chancellors and principals of all other universities and colleges are measured and assessed according to these standards – even if the institutional designs of their institutions were not engineered for this purpose.
You notice the extent of this crisis when former technikons begin to feature humanities courses. Even Technical and Vocational Education and Training colleges located near industrial towns are offering such courses, among them office management courses that are taught by part-time lecturers who teach after hours for a quick buck.
Second, we have a basic education system flooded with teachers who are literally pushing all their learners into the stream of a research university after matric.
Political pressure is applied on teachers to produce miracles to achieve top matric results for their schools so that learners can compete for entry into top universities to enrol for theoretical courses.
In fact, the overwhelming design of public basic education and schooling from grade 1 to grade 12 is embedded on theoretical learning.
We have very few agricultural high schools in SA yet our country has seven rural provinces with farms and untapped arable land that could self-produce to address all our food security challenges.
In essence, our basic education system and the paradigm informing it is unable to educate our youth outside of research university nationalism.
Third, we still have entrenched apartheid legacies lingering all around our education system, to such an extent that the systematic articulations of basic education and higher education are far apart.
And I’m not even talking about the exhausted debate on a 30% pass rate in matric that is met with a 50% requirement at universities.
I’m talking about deep-seated perceptions of what a critical skill is and how it is comprehended for productive purposes.
Black people grew up being told that “hard-hand-skills” are demeaning jobs – and technical colleges are reserved for those who don’t have the abstract thinking capacity to become intellectuals.
It is only the university that hosts smart people who will work in offices as thinkers.
Fast-forward to 2022 and the evidence on the table is the opposite of this notion. The core of entrepreneurship, industrialisation for mass jobs, innovation and wealth creation is actually coming from the hard skills that are the mandate of technical colleges.
University products on the other hand are underemployed, unemployed, misplaced and frustrated, and have no capacity to transfer what they have learnt to any other space to remain productive and competitive.
In a nutshell, if the higher education department intends to see the draft policy implemented in real terms for tangible outcomes, it must focus on doing its homework on three things:
• Build more colleges and revitalise existing ones to provide industry-specific skills and downgrade the dominance of research university nationalism in comprehending democratic education
• The country’s industrialisation strategy must inform the type of a higher education model we require to address our social and economic needs
• Recruit the required experience in institutional management and leadership that will fashion basic education and higher education prerequisites where these two systems will get to articulate a common paradigm between them that is truly engineered to defeat apartheid legacies.
The last point is so important because we will never achieve the targets of this draft policy when we have untrained juniors running government systems of public education.
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