Date: 25/03/2010
Source: the Democratic Alliance
Title: DA: James: Speech by DA Member of Parliament in the debate on the Higher Education and Training budget vote, Parliament

Someone persuaded President Jacob Zuma to spin off a new Department of Higher Education & Training from the old Department of Education.

Presented as an innovation, the idea is a compelling one intended to leverage more opportunities for students by creating a single integrated articulated higher education system.

Universities and further education and training (FET) colleges combined with the sector education and training authorities (SETAS) for this purpose.

The Democratic Alliance prefers combining universities with science and technology to focus on innovation, but it does make sense for a middle-income developing country such as ours, having such a magnitude of skill deficit and high unemployment, to combine higher education with skills development.

In any event, in the United Kingdom, that served as a model for many, they abandoned their experiment with combining science establishments and universities.

At the first budget of the new Department of Higher Education & Training, congratulations go to Minister Blade Nzimande and his civil servants with the birth of their new baby. You have four years - perhaps more - to turn it into a success, which is not a long time at all.

This is though no baby but a reconstituted adult with a bad leg and a good leg.

There are provinces like Gauteng that cannot wait to hand Minister Nzimande their further education and training (FET) colleges on 1 April 2010, the hand-over date to the national department. Tshwane College South & North are considered to be so dysfunctional that some see them as a perpetual source of civil disorder.

Not all of the 50 colleges nation-wide are bad. Indeed, there are many good ones. Most are adrift in uncertainty of curriculum and finance.

Principally, Minister Nzimande has made some promises he cannot keep and therefore lacks the confidence to lead.

There is no money to finance the expansion of the FET college sector from its current enrolment - about which there is some uncertainty - to reach a projected figure of 1 million by 2014.

I assembled a group of distinguished education economists to look carefully and from every possible angle at the budget over the next five years. Unless I am missing something Minister Nzimande does not have the money to achieve the desired FET growth.

The quicker he lowers expectations the better.

To his credit he has managed to squeeze a 20% year-on-year increase and then some amounting to R3.891billion for FET colleges for 2010/11. Except for the last financial year, his predecessor obtained year on year increases of about 20%. Projected increases are of the order of 5% per annum.

With some assumptions made about unit costs, two scenarios emerged. A generous model will cost R28 billion by 2013/14 and a miserly one R14 billion (the MTEF projection is R4.5 billion). We are therefore some R23,7 billion short on the generous model and R9,5 billion on the miserly one.

It is no wonder then that there is no year-by-year practical plan in existence to meet the challenge.

The role of promises in human affairs is about establishing trust. If one does not keep a promise, no will believe you when you make another.

Face is lost and integrity diminished.

Do not make a promise you cannot keep and only make those you can.

The solution? The Democratic Alliance proposes that the Minister uses the National Skills Fund and most of the R6,7 billion to be spent on the SETAS to finance more limited and realistic FET college expansion.

Turning to the good leg, our universities have reached the era of the ‘steady state.' There are issues. Some universities, most notably multi-campus ones like the Tshwane University of Technology, struggle with governance issues post-merger. Academically promising ones like TUT should be helped but the DHE&T lacks the capacity to give it the necessary attention.

Some of the universities of technology are universities only in name. Many of the historically disadvantaged universities - there are exceptions - simply cannot rise beyond the destiny their creators under apartheid intended for them. Graduation rates are poor at some institutions or in some programmes of study, wasting the hard-earned money of parents on top of sending young people on misdirected career paths.

Universities have though achieved traction, in that there is evidence of year-by-year progress at most - not all - of our core institutions. To take universities to a higher level requires that the new Ministry support self-governing universities pay unrelentingly consistent attention to quality in every aspect of development.

Quality is the mantra: Quality in the ranks of the lecturing and professorial staff, in the students admitted, in the programme of study, of teaching, of research and in administration. If we support universities in the quality of what they do, good students will follow in growing abundance.

Minister Nzimande appears to be distracted by the ongoing housekeeping problems of the Tripartite Alliance and by the ANC's crass obsession with racial bean counting that masquerade under the legitimate concern of transformation.

I am puzzled by the fact that the budget makes no provision for the creation of universities in Mpumalanga and the Northern Cape. The Democratic Alliance supports the idea as a critical part of expanding higher education enrolment in our country, provided that it was affordable. Having knowledge and teaching centers in the two relatively poor provinces will make a big difference to their economies and the life-chances of young citizens living there. There are institutes of education upon which to build.

One answer to the challenge is for government to support the creation of independent private universities, including for Mpumalanga and the Northern Cape. It could do by pursuing collaborations with foreign universities - following on the conversations you recently had in the United Kingdom - and the private sector.

Here is a practical example: Monish University of Australia is one of the world's best 50 universities in the world. It is especially known for its medical and health prowess and has recently released a malaria vaccine.

Monash established a campus in Johannesburg, with an able administration and credible series of academic offerings. It is graduating South African students across the population spectrum. Yet it is unable to attract a government subsidy or bursary funds from the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) to make a good performance even better.

New York University has campuses in Paris, Buenos Aires, Shanghai and it is opening more in Abdu Dhabi and Ghana. Imperial College of London, a leading biomedical and science college, has campuses in other countries too.

Governments there provide land and infrastructure and the universities provide the curriculum with world-class lecturers based on fee-paying parents and state bursaries as revenue lines. We can expand opportunities by doing something similar by taxing our imagination and thinking out of the box.

A final point: the Democratic Alliance supports the NSFAS recommendation to provide a single universal bursary sum to students at all our universities. However, the more costly research universities must be allowed to set and therefore raise their fees that the wealthier parents can then pay to cross-subsidise the poorer ones.