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The Report of the Ministerial Committee on the Review of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) is a monumental disappointment.

It contains one virtuous recommendation that is blindingly obvious, which is that the means test should be based on socio-economic or class rather than race criteria.
Most of the report is a tortuous effort to redesign the dinosaur of a bureaucracy NSFAS has become, with no attempt to get to the root of the problems.

There are, furthermore, two egregious vices: the one is the effort to give Higher Education & Training Minister Dr Blade Nzimande license to remove members of the NSFAS Board. He should not be involving himself in what is supposed to be an independent body.

The other is to render private colleges or universities ineligible for state support, despite the fact that these bodies compensate for lack of capacity and quality in many tertiary institutions.

All students with academic talent ought to have the opportunity to pursue higher education. The Democratic Alliance supports the principle that state funds be used to subsidise those students who demonstrably cannot afford college or university education.

The challenge is to find the most effective mechanism to get the overwhelming quantum of funds to eligible students, empower them to find the best academic programmes to serve their aspirations and encourage colleges and universities to compete with one another to enhance the quality of their offerings.

It is the view of the Democratic Alliance that NSFAS should be an independent body robustly protected from state interference. It should only have two functions; firstly, to objectively assess the economic capacity of students to pay fees, and secondly, to distribute their custodian funds to academically eligible students enrolled at academic accredited institutions. Universities and colleges admit students on academic grounds and run their own affairs.

The DA will present an alternative model of student financial aid that will make more funds available, enhance greater freedom of choice for students who will be empowered to follow their careers and inject some competition between universities and colleges that could drive down fees and enhance the quality of their academic offerings.