Leon Smalberger’s article (Sowetan, June 25) raises a debate the sector should welcome, and from where I sit, inside the system responsible for our vocational and technical pathway, much of his alarm is justified. The mismatch between what our institutions produce and what the economy demands is real. The experience gap that keeps young people out of their first job is real.
The eroded standing of the vocational pathway, which he singles out, is the part of his argument I will defend least, because it is the part we’re working hardest to reverse.
The minister of higher education and training told the National Education Summit that we cannot build a future on qualifications that lead to dead-end jobs. I want to set out plainly what the department is doing about it, but a sound response begins with a precise diagnosis, and on two points the diagnosis in this piece needs correcting. Not to defend the system, but because the wrong diagnosis produces the wrong cure.
The first is the headline claim that we produce “too many graduates”. The most recent labour data tells a more precise story. In the first quarter of 2026, the unemployment rate for university graduates was 12.2% against a national rate of 32.7% and against rates above 47% for those who hold only a matric.
A qualification remains the strongest protection a young person has against joblessness. SA does not have a graduate surplus. It has a problem of composition, too many qualifications in some fields, too few in the engineering, data, and technical disciplines the economy is crying out for, and a problem of experience.
Those are different problems from “too many graduates”, and naming them correctly is what makes them solvable. The second is closer to my own desk. Smalberger writes of a vocational pathway in decline and of institutions that have seen little investment, and he refers to the technical stream as “formerly the technikon model”. Here the record needs straightening.
The technikons did not decline; they became our universities of technology. The TVET colleges are a separate stream with a separate history, and it is that stream, not the technikon lineage, where the standing and quality challenge sits. The distinction matters because it tells us exactly where the rebuilding must happen, and it is happening.
Smallberger is right about the consequence, though, and it is worth stating clearly. When the occupational pathway loses standing, demand pours into universities that cannot absorb it, and young people who would flourish as artisans, technicians, and engineering technologists are pushed toward degrees that suit neither them nor the industries meant to employ them. The answer to that bottleneck is not to lament the colleges. It is to make them good enough that families choose them on their merits.
That is the task we have set for ourselves, and it has four concrete parts.
First, we are rebuilding occupational qualifications and the governance of the colleges that deliver them. A national compact for vocational excellence is drawing together the bodies responsible for skills standards, artisan development, and trade testing so that what a college teaches maps onto a real occupation.
Smalberger cites the phasing out of nearly 1,500 legacy qualifications as a symptom of dysfunction. I would put it the other way: clearing out qualifications built for the economy of 30 years ago is the precondition for replacing them with programmes built for this one.
That work is under way, alongside a hard-edged overhaul of college governance, because no curriculum reform survives weak institutions.
Second, we’re closing the experience gap that Smalberger rightly calls decisive. The evidence tells us that young people with work experience move into employment at roughly four times the rate of those without it.
A qualification with no structured route into practice is, as he says, too often an expensive piece of paper. The remedy is not fewer qualifications; it is qualifications welded to the workplace.
This is the central purpose of the reform we’re driving through the SETAs, focusing a fragmented set of bodies and steering the training levies that employers already pay toward workplace-based learning, apprenticeships, and internships. Employers who want experienced graduates have to help build the experience. We’re building the machinery for them to do exactly that, and the colleges sit at the centre of it.
Third, we’re learning to see the labour market more clearly. Smalberger’s sharpest and fairest charge is that the sector has measured its inputs, enrolments and throughput, rather than its outputs. He’s right. We’re standing up a dedicated skills intelligence capability to match what the system produces against what the economy demands, closer to real time, so that the shortages he names are met by design rather than discovered after the fact.
Fourth, we are working to keep the pathway affordable and durable so that a young person who chooses the occupational route is funded to finish it and supported into work, rather than left to fall between the cracks of a system that was never built for them.
Durability has to start earlier than the college gate. Working with the department of basic education, we’re building a clear line of articulation from schooling into the TVET system through the Three-Stream Model.
Technical high schools and schools of specialisation are being strengthened in places newly built to anchor this model with grade 10-12 subjects aligned to NCV and National Accredited Technical Education Diploma-successor qualifications so that a learner is moving from a technical-vocational stream into a TVET college and continuing a programme, not starting one cold.
The honest measure of this sector is not how many young people we enrol but how many we set to work. That is the right measure.
- Zungu is the deputy director-general in the department of higher education and training responsible for TVET education branch.
