of poor students enrolled over the same period; (3) a growing reliance on raising tuition fees as the only way to recover institutional income; and (4) a mounting inefficiency within undergraduate institutions as the growing number of students were mainly from academically dysfunctional schools, leading to high dropout and low graduation rates. Together these four elements caused the perfect storm which, university leaders say, could be seen coming from a distance.
Declining subsidies
Without question, the primary driver of the crisis in South African universities was the declining state subsidy in successive years and its deteriorating impact on institutional budgets. The vice-chancellor of Wits summarises the situation as follows:
Adam Habib: Since 2000, we have had a political economy of the universities where the subsidy, in per capita terms, is declining. Universities have tried to compensate by increasing student fees to make up for that deficit. So if you look at the historically white universities … in 1994, 1993, Wits had 70 per cent of its expenses covered by the government subsidy. By 2013, 2014, it’s down to 30 to 35 per cent. What the university then does is increase the fees. But there is no doubt that as we were increasing the fees by double-digit percentages – to compensate for inflation and currency exchange rates and all of that – effectively what we have done is to price higher education beyond reach. And all of these things came together to create quite an explosive mix by 2011, 2012, 2013. It’s quite a threat at multiple levels. All you need is two or three sparks to ignite a crisis. And by the way, we recognise that.
So vice-chancellors were saying for many years that this is unsustainable. In fact, at the end of September 2015 I had written on behalf of the Universities South Africa [USAf] to the president [Jacob Zuma], above the minister of higher education [Blade Nzimande], arguing for a meeting with vice-chancellors in early October 2015. At that meeting all of these issues were raised. We said to him that we’re heading for the eye of a storm, except we said that the storm would break in January because that’s when we anticipated that the students would strike. What actually happened is it exploded ten days later in the October #FeesMustFall protest across the country. But we saw it coming.
The Wits vice-chancellor was not alone in foretelling the storm; so too did Ahmed Bawa, who until recently was the head of the Durban University of Technology (DUT) and is now the head of USAf, which represents all vice-chancellors.
Ahmed Bawa: Without question I think most vice-chancellors recognise that the system was quickly running into a kind of unaffordable situation where sooner or later there was going to be an upheaval. Some of us actually wrote about that. That a kind of perfect storm was coming at us and that we had to rapidly think about restructuring higher education. And many of us also had this analysis that you had to think of higher education as having a social justice agenda in a situation where there is an unequal society. There was the added problem that with the fees running high and with the ceiling on the amount of financial aid available, fewer and fewer students would be able to come to university.
So I think that among at least some of us there was a view that these 10 per cent increases, although they were necessary for the viability of the institutions, were sooner or later going to lead to difficulty. No amount of interaction with the Department of Higher Education and Training [DHET] resulted in any kind of conversation that would begin to look at that problem in some detail. Every single meeting we had with Minister Nzimande – and not just this minister but also previous ministers – failed to engage in any kind of serious discussion about the financial viability of the universities. So my own view at DUT was, let’s just try to manage the needs of students who are most at risk, and let’s just try to understand if there’s capacity within the institution itself to bring some resources to the table, much to the anger of the council and so on, but at the same time just being really rigorous about trying to ensure that we don’t put the university into financial crisis. But what it meant essentially is that we were spending less and less on maintenance and less and less on the kind of things necessary to build a decent research system and so on.
The vice-chancellor of the University of Johannesburg (UJ), a large multi-campus institution, foretold the same storm and unpacked its effects across the top tier of South African universities.
Ihron Rensburg: I think that all of us default to a kind of financial or economics argument to explain the crisis. And as the record shows, we’ve seen a long-run decline in per student state expenditure, and that decline now has the effect that the twelve leading research-productive universities now find themselves with 50 per cent or less of their income coming from the state’s side. And so, over a twenty-year period we have seen significant growth in tuition fees to close that gap. In the last seven years, my estimate is that across the sector, at least among those twelve or so universities, tuition fees have doubled. And the reason why that has happened is that salaries have increased ahead of inflation as expected, and when you give inflationary increases and 60 per cent of your costs is driven by your people cost, then you’re already in a big, big deficit. But of course there are other things in play as well. If we consider that in just the last three years the rand has halved in value against major global currencies, it has impacted our journal-purchasing capacity and our research infrastructure capacity, just to pick those two by way of example. And so all of these factors have basically put university inflation closer to 9 or 10 per cent on average over this last decade, and that has really been a major driver of the crisis that unfolded in 2015.
Yet even if the single most important factor in the 2015–2016 crisis was the declining government subsidy to public universities, such financial analysis means little unless one understands it in the context of the daily struggles of students on campuses. And vice-chancellors like Ahmed Bawa, who were engaged with students on the ground, could see that crisis in the eyes of the students.
Ahmed Bawa: You know, it depends on where you’re sitting in the system. I spent about six years at DUT and every single year we had demonstrations. I think there was [only] one year when we avoided a major clash. And the demonstrations were always over the same issue. Every now and then the students would add other issues to the demands, such as problems in the residences, but generally speaking it was about one thing only – financial aid.
What I’ll never forget is the experience I had at one of the demonstrations. I happened to be in this hall in the basement of the engineering building and there were thousands of students in there. And I thought I would take this as an opportunity to address the students. There was, as usual, a group of students toyi-toyiing, and it just so happens that I made eye contact with some students who were just behind this dancing group. And I caught sight of this group of students, boys and girls, who weren’t toyi-toyiing but who were just clearly in a state of anguish. I actually saw some of the women students crying, and it suddenly dawned on me that while it is true that some students were using this issue for political ends, ultimately it was really about access to higher education; it was really about students who come from very poor backgrounds who are trying desperately to get out of poverty. And this was their one step out of poverty. Some believed in the notion that getting a university qualification would get you out of poverty. And that forced me to be much more nuanced in the way in which I thought about this, and fortunately this happened quite early on in my years as vice-chancellor.
So to be honest, I wasn’t overly surprised by what eventually happened at Wits and UCT and Rhodes and UJ, and then, of course, the rest of the universities. Slowly but surely the needs of students who depended on financial aid would also reach these places.
This reference in the last paragraph to the more elite of the former white universities is an important one in that the issue of fee increases would have different meanings and impacts across the higher education sector. In fact, the student uprising revealed in dramatic ways the inequality across institutions, as UCT vice-chancellor Max Price describes in relation to arguably the most elite of South Africa’s 26 public universities.
Max Price: I think that the October 2015 events actually only happened on our campus at all because of national solidarity. There were no issues for us in terms of fees and affordability; we’ve been fortunate to be able to manage. And by way of example, the president of the SRC – the same SRC that led the Rhodes Must Fall campaign – proposed in the council the fee increase of 10,5 per cent. The SRC was completely