Blog 19 Tertiary education

What?

Tertiary education must be made both more accessible and more fit for purpose.

Why?

1)        Our school system is failing to give an adequate opportunity to most pupils to get an adequate matric to gain access to tertiary education.

2)        The school system is also not preparing students adequately to cope with tertiary education. This contributes to the fact that only 22% of students at universities complete a three - year degree in 3 years and 40 to 50 % drop out altogether. This is an incredible waste of very valuable and scarce resources. How do we increase the success rate of our students? How do we assist the currently disadvantaged school leavers to get selected for university and be able to take full advantage of that opportunity?

3)        The figures for Universities of Technology are no better. Only 25 to 20% complete in the minimum time and 40 to 50% drop out in the first year with up to 60 percent overall dropout rate.

4)        A three - year degree costs someone between R225000 and R450000 in total including residence but excluding plus books, transport and personal costs of between R81000 and R165000.

5)        The figures for the “Tech” are R165000 to R285000 plus expenses.

6)        Engineering degrees are more expensive R360000 to R580 000 at a residential university or R240000 to R400000 at a technical university.

7)        UNISA costs are R99000 to R135000 for a BA degree, R117000 to R153000 for a BCom degree and R135000 to R201000 for a BSc degree / engineering including books.

8)        All of these costs assume that the student graduates in the normal or minimum number of years. More that half of the students who do graduate fail at least one year and so take more years – which increases the costs.

9)        Only 47.8% of the 705 thousand matriculants last year achieved a pass rate that would allow them to proceed to higher education. This is only 27.6% of the grade one students who enrolled ten years before.

10)   Consider a sample of our competitors (or countries that have rapidly moved out of poverty):

	%age finish school	%age of these graduating tertiary	%age engineers	%age lawyers	%age accountants / BCom	%age Humanities	%age Doctors	%age nurses
SA	60	20 to 22	5	3	38	16	5	3
S Korea	98	70	9	2	14	12	4	3
China	87	55	33	4	20	10	3	2
Malasia	85	35 to 40	15	3	25	10	4	4

The standout differences are how few of our children finish school. Then how few of these become graduates and how few of our graduates are engineers.

How?

We must find a way to increase the marketable skills of our young people. Attempts at “job creation” by government are a chimera, fool’s gold. Jobs only exist because there is work which needs to be done and which will create or sustain more money than the cost of the job (i.e.: are nett productive). This presupposes that a person will have enough skills to perform the job in such a productive fashion. Without these two aspects – work that needs doing and skilled applicants there is no sustainable reason for a job to exist.

Long term, our schools should all be good enough that the vast majority of children will be able to cope with a tertiary education (if they so desire). As it now stands, the chances that a child who attends a quintile 1 school (the poorest level) will do well enough and get the support necessary to attend university is a fraction of better resourced schools in wealthier areas. Here are the percentages of matriculants who start first year university from each level of school:

Quintile 1: 9.2%

Quintile 2: 11.2%

Quintile 3:14.7%

Quintile 4: 23.5%

Quintile 5: 45.2%

So, clearly here is an obvious metric showing who should benefit from affirmative selection to get a place in higher education. Not a race - based decision, but one based in measurable disadvantage – “how good is your school”

Against this we have the following data from the study of the 2008 matriculants to see how many had dropped out or graduated withing six years: -

Quintile 1: 70% dropout

Quintile 2: 68% dropout

Quintile 3: 65% dropout

Quintile 2: 50% dropout

Quintile 1: 35% dropout

If we were to take a utilitarian ethics approach to these numbers, given the high cost of tertiary education and the need South Africa has for skills, it can be argued that preference should be given to quintile 1 and 2 pupils as we will get far more graduates for our limited resources. BUT this is not the right plan – it will entrench inequality and the cycle of poverty passing from generation to generation. We will lose the potential of all the talent in poor schools and never (as a country) rise up. We must find a way to give preferential access to those pupils from poor areas and yet have them succeed in reasonable numbers. A countries trajectory is defined more by the opportunities it gives its poor than by the achievements of its rich. We must keep that classic promise to our youth “you can become whatever you choose to become”.

It is not good enough to just give a place in a university to a disadvantaged student. As I showed above, the students who have the worst school education are not succeeding at university. The problem is that University courses were designed to be three 4 or 6 years assuming a certain high school education standard. Taking a student with a far worse education and expecting them to cope with the first-year work (in particular) is not fair. To their credit, many universities offer extra academic support to disadvantaged students (at some cost) – but this is still wrong - headed. Students, even from the best schools find first year an adjustment. The switch from small classes to hundreds in a class, from having course work spoon fed to you and external discipline on you to make sure you are keeping up to the “find your own information” and freedom from external discipline of university  from teachers looking over your shoulder as you work to pick up your struggles to being adrift in a world which does not seem to care if you sink or swim is challenging. How on earth can we expect a poorly prepared student to catch up a multitude of missed concepts from school while also keeping up with first year course work? Many have already failed (or failed to submit) assignments within six weeks of arriving. Couple this with studying in another language with no-one who can translate the concepts for mother tongue understanding, far from home, trying to cope with homesickness and the distractions of university social life and lack of money – is a recipe for loss of hope, despair, dropping out or worse mental health problems. Why are we doing this to these students – the cream of their communities? Many of the soft costs are hidden and born by families (clothing needed to fit in at university, trips home for emotional support and so forth). Students from poor families are doubly disadvantaged – often unable to return home for holidays and alienated from their families. Students from the poorest families having the highest incidence of suicidal thoughts.

University courses from first to final year are not the same content. If you battle in first year, but somehow survive, the opportunity to learn that subject matter better is gone – it is not repeated in second and third year. Even if these students are coping better by second year they have lost out on the enrichment first year could have provided. In actual fact, there is little evidence that they do cope better. What happens is that those that cope least well drop out in first year – making second year pass rates better.

Surely, we need a two - part assessment for university (or Tech) admission. Firstly, an assessment to decide whether you be given a place based on your performance compared to your peer group (your school quintile) in Matric. Secondly (in absolute terms) are you actually ready to be able to not just survive but to thrive in first year? If the answer is yes for the first question but no for the second, then surely we should accept them to university, but give them a bridging year (or two if needed) so that their skills are equal to the tasks they will face in first year (similar to the foundation year offered by some universities). These bridging courses must truly be “bridges” with one foot anchored in school - work and one in first year university work. These will give the students solid high school basic skills needed for their chosen course and an introduction to the concepts they will meet in first year.

As schools improve with time, there will be less and less need for the bridging courses.

The next issue is that we need more places at tertiary education so that more of our young people will have more skills.

So now the natural question is how we pay for these extra places and for the extra years of study in some cases.

The answer is distance education. Residential education is two to three times more expensive than distance education. If all our current first year residential students are rather studying via distance education the saved NSFAS funding can be used to cover more students. The money saved by having less students repeat years of study can be used to help cover the bridging courses which prevent those failures. The extra years successfully passing a bridging course is far more valuable than extra years spend repeating failed years at university. The bridging courses can in themselves be diploma courses – making students who complete them (but do not study further) more marketable.

ALL first- and second-year university courses should only offered as online courses to save money. The didactic part of the teaching can be standardised and lectures planned by the very best. The lectures can be reviewed every second or third year and rewritten as needed. It is a myth that advances are so rapid that the course material needs constant upgrading or changing – particularly at first- and second-year level. The same applies to the bridging courses.  Just as in my Blog concerning schooling, the didactic material and video demonstrations can be prepared by the best, most gifted teachers and “performed” by actors in all the official languages to bypass the language barriers.   

The lecturers and tutors who would normally be giving didactic lectures can spend their teaching time setting and marking assignments and tests for a far larger number of students. In fact, AI will assess the work of students in seconds and be able to expertly advise students on how to improve or where their weaknesses lie.

If we embrace distance education aided by AI we can make a step change in our tertiary education. Access to high-speed internet is rapidly becoming less of a barrier with a combination of Herotel in cities and Starlink in rural areas – perhaps via a Wi-Fi zone based in high schools.

Living at home with the support of their families is far cheaper than living away in a residence and internet data is far cheaper than travelling to university. Students who have been given a pathway from a poor matriculation via an online bridging course and the two years of undergraduate course work will be excellently positioned to transition to a final year or two (or 4 in the case of medicine) at a residential university. In these final years, practical work or in person seminars and debates and tutorials can dominate the course work – so giving students that broadening experience which is such a vital part of tertiary education.

Having no massive first and second year student numbers on campus will mean that there is more residence space, lecture space etc for the final year students – so that many more can be accommodated without building out the physical architecture of the universities.

Some special areas can have specific low cost (to government) solutions. If (as I have suggested in previous blogs) SETAs are abandoned as they are not effective this will leave more money in industry to spend on training. Hospital groups should be given freedom to train as many nurses as they wish. They can contract them to “work back” their tuition fees over a number of years. They are keen to do this and will end our nursing crisis.

Similarly, we need to bring back our apprentice system for artisans. We have a desperate shortage of people who can actually build maintain and fix things. There are for example private companies already training locomotive diesel mechanics – these students should be allowed some degree of state support too. If most of the costs are born by the private enterprise – it’s a huge saving for the state.

We also need to skew our tertiary opportunities towards what we need in society. We must have many more positions in technical/ engineering fields to come in line with our competitor nations. It must also be far easier to get financial assistance for these courses.

Finally, we need a massive focus on tourism. We have a natural advantage in that we have classic African Safaris, the Cape winelands, the unique fynbos, the Drakensburg and the warm seas and sun of KZN. None of these can be stolen from us by a factory in the east. They are in our hands to maximise or not. We need to have many hospitality and hotel schools. We should be churning out so many excellent chef’s that every little hotel or restaurant has excellent food. Every waiter should be an expert, every tour guide knowledgeable and skilled at giving tourists the best possible experience. Dealing with tourists in a charming, warm and welcoming way comes naturally to us and the fine details of what makes a difference and causes todays tourist to become our best advert next year can be taught. Most of the skills needed to work in the tourism industry do not require you to have had a good school education.

We also have a secret weapon which we have not yet adequately utilised. We are after all the rainbow nation; we have 11 official languages. Almost every South African can speak at least one second language passably well and many are multilingual. Even extremely poor people who are functionally illiterate can usually speak more than one language. As soon as you are a multilingual person, it is relatively easy to learn another (many studies have proved this – 20 to 50% faster vocabulary acquisition). Our government hotel / hospitality schools must teach all students one or more of our top ten foreign tourist languages. It is true that you can talk to a person’s brain if you speak a language they understand, but if you want to speak to their heart, you must speak in their mother tongue. Imagine if we had teams of tourism ambassadors waiting between the airport gates and immigration offering hot wet cloths for our visitors to refresh after their 12, 18 or more our trip to get here a cup of coffee or a South African fruit juice and crucially speaking in their own language – welcoming them to our country. It is a huge investment in effort for tourists to travel all the way to visit us. We need to thank them and make them feel loved and welcome as they land.

Imagine too if they often found hotel staff trained to help them solve their travel problems in their own language or a safari guide explaining our incredible nature in their own language.

Why not?

Students want to experience university life from first year. It is true that the campus experience is valuable for students who can get a place and are well prepared to cope with it. This is not so for most matriculants (on both counts). It is something we have to sacrifice to solve our bigger problems.

Universities need the funding they receive from first- and second-year students. They will still receive funding – just from supervising distance education and will also have many more third and fourth (and fifth and sixth) year students. 

Referendum

If you agree that:

·        Affirmative selection for tertiary education should be based on school quintile (not race)

·        that students who need it should be given a bridging course so that they can succeed at university

·        that the first two years of university should be online only

·        that apprenticeships for artisan work should be revived

·        that private (and state) nursing colleges should be restarted

·        that teacher training colleges should be restarted

·        that financial support should be more focussed on engineering and science degrees and TOURISM

·        that financial support should be easily available for students wishing to enter hospitality / tourism

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