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The Roots of the Crisis I: Financial Exclusion

Professor, as you can see, I have a beautiful face. I do not want

to use it. But I need food to eat. Money to study. A place

to live. I cannot go on like this. But if I must, what can I do?

I can make lots of money with this face.

– Excerpt from a UFS student’s email

Having spent most of my working life teaching and leading young people, I know a blackmail note from a student when I see one. But this particular email (see excerpt above) was not blackmail. Ntokoza (not her real name), a young, soft-spoken woman from Umlazi township in Durban, had travelled all the way to Bloemfontein on her own. She was not one of the top students we had selected for full funding; her marks were good, but not as competitive as those of other students who qualified for the limited pool of full state aid. She came to UFS anyway, made her way into classes, squatted with some friends, and now that tuition payment was due, she faced the real possibility of financial exclusion.

It often happens that students without a cent for their studies take advantage of provisional registration (a partial payment arrangement) in the faint hope that money will materialise from somewhere – a miracle, nothing less. This provisional arrangement to access university and attend classes is an accommodation sympathetic universities make to give students more time to find the funds for their studies. One deadline for payment is pushed back to another deadline and, under pressure from student leaders, pushed back again. Suddenly, the year-end examinations loom and there are still students who do not have the funds to pay. Unsurprisingly, students then enter the next year of studies with debt from the previous year, and the administrative dance between deadline enforcement and sympathetic accommodation takes place all over again.

Ntokoza had eventually run out of options as another cut-off deadline loomed, and in desperation she sent me an email, begging for assistance. ‘Ask her to see me,’ I instructed my secretary, and within hours the frail, downcast student appeared in my office. Rarely had I seen such deep sadness in another person, and I had to ask Ntokoza to raise her faint voice so that I could hear her from across my desk. I clicked my computer mouse and the screen showed that there really was very little money left to support students from my ‘cost centres’ – unless I once again dipped into my personal banking account. But if my wife found out I would be dead meat; we were already supporting too many students from the family budget. And I could not bear my secretary coming into my office and once again giving me those big eyes that said, ‘Alweer’ (Not again). That would be infinitely worse than appearing before a long-suffering priest to confess that you had sinned again.

How does one explain the situation of this academically talented student – and many others – in a university that desperately wants to help each and every high school graduate qualifying for degree studies? Four factors converged to create this state of affairs: (1) a steady decline in the state subsidy to universities over two decades; (2) a dramatic increase in the number 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 aligned with that high fee increase because we’d worked through it with them over a month; that was in September, a month before the unrest. And because we worked closely with the SRC in setting the fees, they understood that all of the students on financial aid were completely covered. We do not have any ‘top ups’ or other things that they have to pay, and therefore they face a zero per cent fee increase anyway. And secondly, because we’ve got a significant number of middle-class students, more than 50 per cent, who can pay the full fee, we can cross-subsidise the so-called ‘missing middle’ students,1 which other campuses generally can’t. So even the students from households with up to R550 000 in income can get the necessary loans and financial aid from us. These students do end up with debt when they’ve graduated, and of course the debt is bigger when the fee increase is bigger, but it’s relatively manageable.

So the zero per cent fee increase campaign which started at Wits got exacerbated at the [Durban] Summit on Higher Education Transformation convened by Blade Nzimande in October 2015.2 The minister was incredibly condescending and dismissive of the students, as was reported to me, and that created a solidarity. And of course on many of the campuses, particularly the historically white campuses, the challenge is this ‘missing middle’ group of students because they don’t get the benefit of financial aid; they’re struggling. At the Summit, our SRC initially said that our campus wouldn’t be able to join this campaign, because they didn’t have a problem with the fees. But once the protests took off, there was this need for national solidarity, so it affected us too.

This middle group was not a new phenomenon in universities, but now it had a name. The ‘missing middle’ refers to those students who do not qualify for the government’s National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS), because although their parents earned above R120 000 per year, this income was insufficient to pay the overall costs of a university education, which could run on average between R80 000 to R100 000 per annum. Here is a typical student story presented during one of my daily ‘open door sessions’ with students; let’s call her Katryn:

My mother is a teacher and my father has his own company. We did not qualify for NSFAS. The problem is there are two of us here at university, and even though to save money we decided to stay at home rather than in residence, my parents simply cannot afford to keep both of us here. My dad’s company has also been going up and down. He is still waiting to get paid by a government department. One of his friends also dropped him. Can you help us?

Katryn is one of many students who are not ‘the poorest of the poor’, to use a familiar South African expression; they fall between the cracks. And this newly visible demographic of students who were both not poor enough and not rich enough was beginning to gain traction within the public debates and the campus protests around fee increases.3 There was no plan for them. The poor were bailed out by government and the wealthy bailed themselves out. But the ‘missing middle’ were feeling the pinch of the annual tuition as they struggled to stay in the race, particularly at the historically white campuses. And it is this group, says Adam Habib, that identifies the student protests as ‘not a working-class revolt; you’re seeing a middle-class revolt in these universities because of the “missing middle”’.

Explosion in student numbers

If the decline in government subsidies placed pressure on institutional budgets, the rapid growth in student numbers exacerbated the situation to a crisis point. What was once an elite university system would quickly become, under the dual post-apartheid imperatives of democratisation and deracialisation, a massified system of higher education. The doors of culture and learning, to draw on the inspired Freedom Charter of the ANC, were now truly thrown wide open. In fact, university enrolments increased from 493 342 in 1994 to nearly 1 million (969 154) in 2014, with a targeted 1,6 million enrolments by 2030, according to a government White Paper.4

There were three major problems with this otherwise welcome development. First, the system had no capacity to absorb these large numbers as infrastructure crumbled under the weight of massification. Second, the majority of students now entering universities were academically weak because of a largely dysfunctional school system for the majority of learners, thereby creating massive inefficiencies in higher education. For example, cohort studies showed that of the students pursuing a three-year bachelor’s degree, less than 50 per cent would attain that qualification within six years.5 Third, the preference for university studies – a deep-seated reaction to the colonial and apartheid distaste for academic education for the ‘natives’ – created the so-called inverted pyramid in which the majority of post-school learners were in universities (about 1 million) and not technical and vocational education (about 700 000).

In short, there was less money but more students. With typical understatement, the Council on Higher Education (CHE), a statutory body that advises the minister of higher education, would muse that the ‘growth in student enrolment was not matched by a proportionate growth in subsidy’.6 Moreover, there were more students enrolled but fewer students graduating, creating very high inefficiency costs in an already faltering higher education system.

Ihron Rensburg: The student body shifted and is shifting at UJ. A decade ago, only 8 per cent of those in the first-year class came from Quintile 1 and 2 schools [the poorest schools]. It’s 28 per cent today; and of course it’s not just that grouping. It’s also your Quintile 3 and 4 schools and even in Quintile 5 schools [the most privileged schools], where you’ve got working-class children who don’t qualify for state aid. So it’s a big shift and what that means is parents go out of their way to put their children in there.

Here are two critical observations: the rapid growth in the number of poor students and the demand this places on financial aid within one university, a confluence that would explain the ferocity of the protests at UJ and other universities with such remarkable shifts in campus demographics. That growth also impacts on the efficiency of the higher education system, as the UJ vice-chancellor explains:

Ihron Rensburg: Of course the pressure is on universities to improve success rates. As Sizwe Nxasana [the experienced banker appointed by Nzimande in August 2015 to turn around the NSFAS] argues, whether it is to finance that poorer group or the ‘missing middle’, he needs to mobilise close to R10 billion a year. He can only mobilise that kind of resource from the private sector, from development finance institutions such as PIC, Development Bank and so on, if there is a yield for those who put money in; they don’t want to put money into a bottomless pit. There needs to be some recycling of that fund. In order for that to happen, our current on-time graduation rate of 29 per cent or so needs to improve by 10 ten per cent, he says; ideally by 20 per cent. So from 29 per cent, if you can get it closer to 35 or 36 per cent, there’s an ability to turn around the situation, meaning there is money coming back into universities for such a potential scheme for the ‘missing middle’. But if there is no new or improved performance of the system, that [investment] scheme is going to fall.

Lourens van Staden, the vice-chancellor of one of South Africa’s most consistently turbulent universities, the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT), looks like a bunch of taut muscles rolled into one. This pugilistic-looking character is not one you would want to meet in a dark alley, for he looks like someone who would enjoy boxing your ears just for fun. This image has served him well, deployed as he has been by various ministers to bring a semblance of peace to the most difficult campuses in the country. This is an unusual role for an unusual South African: a white man of Afrikaans heritage who is fluent in an African language. True to his image, Lourens van Staden does not flinch from telling you exactly what he thinks.

Lourens van Staden: Well, I disagree with the government’s National Development Plan (NDP). Where have you seen a system where there are more students in universities than in colleges and elsewhere in the post-school system? This thing should be turned around. But the current system they tried to build is useless. Sorry, I’m straight; it’s useless, the so-called TVET [Technical and Vocational Education and Training] colleges. So where do the students go? Don’t think they are stupid. Our kids are intelligent. They know these colleges – what would it help them to go there? Where else can they go?

Career-focused training colleges are theoretically ideal for absorbing the masses of students, but in the South African context this option is unattractive. The college cultures are decrepit, staff attitudes are negative, the work ethic is poor, competent lecturers are in short supply, and what should be a solution to the inverted pyramid problem has a serious marketing problem. And the students know it; they prefer universities. The problem, Van Staden concludes, is that there is no shortcut to acquiring competent technicians or to resolving these issues of image and reputation in a broken system of alternative ‘career pathing’ for high school graduates.

Declining pass rates

As student numbers have grown, pass rates have declined. In terms of subsidy income, these trends represented a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the more students enrolled, the higher the ‘teaching inputs’; hence the subsidy increases. On the other hand, the fewer students who graduate, or who graduate on time, the lower the ‘teaching outputs’; thus the subsidy decreases. In other words, what universities may make on the inputs, they lose again on the outputs.

So what do institutions tend to do? They exploit this formula by increasing enrolments as much as possible and put pressure on their systems (academic departments, tutorial systems, centres for teaching and learning, etc.) to enhance pass rates. The DHET, in order to demonstrate that it has fulfilled its political mandate to open up access to more and more students, sets sometimes very high targets for enrolment, which some institutions agree to but cannot meet. So to prevent exploitation, government sets ‘caps’ on those enrolments.

Throughput rates – a measure of the time it takes students to graduate – are more difficult to control. Unscrupulous institutions might artificially enhance the pass rates or engage in dubious practices – such as one university that allowed students to write their examinations at home and without monitoring.7 There is just one limitation on these attempts to game the system: the overall funding pie remains constant. This means that to gain more out of the subsidy, an institution must not only do better on its own terms, but also do much better than the other 25 public universities. It is a messy business, but money is in short supply for all of them.

It is, however, very difficult to artificially raise a student’s results, and most universities play by the rules in large part because of the conscience of the academic lecturers. Most pride themselves on their disciplines and the quality of their qualifications. Some disciplines, such as accountancy and medicine, are governed by external examination bodies, and there is the real threat of loss of accreditation if such scams became known. And so, with growing numbers of academically weak students from the school system enrolled at universities, more and more students struggle to master the coursework and the failure rate continues to increase.

Consider the case of Sipho (not his real name), who has visited my office at UFS many times. Sometimes he changes his name in the registry so that he will have another opportunity to plead for one more chance. It is a practice in my office that no student comes through the door unless I see his or her academic record first. This allows for students to be referred to the more appropriate office for assistance, or to prevent repeat calls to the same desk. Sipho’s record indicates that he has failed nearly all his modules two or three times. A rule was created in which a student cannot fail a module more than twice. There are grounds for appeal, and most students are given a third opportunity. If they fail again, they are advised to do the outstanding module through UNISA. But no matter what Sipho is told, he refuses to accept the verdict of the various offices of appeal. He is desperate, and no amount of tutoring and special assistance and multiple opportunities can help him. But he will not take no for an answer.

I have seen hundreds of Siphos in my seven years at the helm of UFS. Every time my administrator’s heart beaks. A careful reading of an academic record as a historical document will suggest one of two things: either Sipho should never have been admitted to university, given his matriculation certificate, or Sipho will never pass at a university level even if his original school certificate qualified him for tertiary studies.

Few university leaders understand that difficult transition from school to university better than Sizwe Mabizela, the vice-chancellor of Rhodes University. A kind-hearted man with boundless empathy for students, he once headed the quality assurance body that sets the standards for school-leaving certificates.

Sizwe Mabizela: What is actually happening and has been happening for a long time is that universities are receiving more and more students who are unprepared for higher education. And if you look at the performance of our public higher education system, the dropout rates are frightening. In fact, almost half of the young people who enrol at our public higher education institutions leave the system without a qualification of one kind or another. That, of course, is a colossal waste of human potential, and the reason why they’re in that predicament is that there aren’t any viable, attractive post-school education and training opportunities except university.

I’ve argued on a number of occasions that this country does not need more people with university degrees. What this country desperately needs at its level of development are more young people with artisanal skills. One can pour in money to deal with the funding of higher education. But that in and of itself will not make the significant difference, because you have young people in a public higher education system who should not have been there in the first place, who would have benefited by going to a TVET college. Unfortunately, those colleges are not institutions of choice at the moment. And so as part of resolving the challenges of higher education, we need to pay greater attention to our TVET colleges. Make them institutions of choice.

I’ve also made a lot of noise about the message that we send with our National Senior Certificates (NSCs): it is very problematic when you classify an NSC as a certificate, diploma, or bachelor pass. A bachelor pass sends the message that the person should go to university, and so anyone with a bachelor pass, which unfortunately does not take much to achieve, simply thinks of university. I wish we would change that classification so that some of those with a pass that is equivalent to a bachelor pass could see themselves going to a TVET college because that’s what would appeal to them.

The other thing that is very important relates to the curriculum in our higher education institutions. It is one thing to facilitate physical access to a university; it is quite another to facilitate what Wally Morrow [the late South African philosopher of education] refers to as ‘epistemological access’. That means access to knowledge, what knowledge is and how you construct knowledge, and all of that. We have succeeded in facilitating physical access, but I don’t think we have been that successful in facilitating access to knowledge. And that, of course, is reflected in the dropout rate that I referred to earlier.

If I had my way as far as higher education is concerned, I would cap the numbers and say no more growth, and if there is growth it has to be very small and controlled, and that we must pay attention to what is happening within the universities. Improve the pass and graduation rates. Improve the throughput rate. Those are absolutely abysmal, which is one of those things fuelling #FeesMustFall. You have young people who are frustrated, who come from poor families, and they just can’t make sense of what is happening at universities. They drop out in large numbers and that’s a mix that leads to incredible levels of frustration.

This frustration on the part of students is real, and university principals encounter it all the time, sometimes with dangerous consequences. For example, at UFS Sibusiso (not his real name), having once again failed his course, angrily confronted his lecturer. He threatened to get physical and started to throw things around in her office. She was mortified. When she told him the results were accurate, he called her a racist. She offered to refer his plea higher up. Eventually it reached my office. After a thorough review, I told him that multiple failures after repeated opportunities and assistance meant that he would not be able to pass the course. Sibusiso then threatened the lecturer’s life on social media. (An investigation revealed that he was the perpetrator, working from an off-campus site.) Personal security arrangements were made for the lecturer, and Sibusiso was expelled. Nevertheless he has found his way into the protest marches on campus. His intense frustration and anger mix in with the protest about student fees, helping to facilitate the addition of all kinds of other agendas onto the list of protestor demands – including accusations of racist lecturers and individual targeting. The real truth about Sibusiso’s case melts seamlessly into the heat of the protests.

Tuition fee hikes

As subsidies have come down, tuition fees have gone up. From 2000 to 2012, the government’s contribution to higher education decreased from 49 per cent to 40 per cent (and was as low as 38 per cent in 2014).8 In the same period, students’ contribution to university funding increased from 24 per cent to 31 per cent.9 As tuition fees increased from R12,2 billion to R15,5 billion between 2010 and 2012, student debt rose from R2,6 billion to R3,4 billion.10 In percentage terms, as a share of institutional funding tuition fees increased from 24 per cent in 2000 to 33 per cent in 2014.

The conclusion is straightforward: students could not afford the tuition hikes and the burden of debt became a reality, not only for those who graduated, but also for those who dropped out with debt and without a degree. It was a cruel calculus for the materially poor and academically disadvantaged.

Now to be clear, it is not that funded students paid the fee increases themselves, although there is little recognition of this simple fact in the protest movement. Moreover, government has substantially increased NSFAS funding in the past and present, and has promised to do so into the future. In 1991 the NSFAS funded 7 240 students to the tune of R21,4 million; by 2014 the scheme funded 409 475 students at a cost of R9 billion. Those on state funding – whether from the NSFAS, a more general fund, or the Funza Lushaka Bursary – were fully covered for most of their costs. If anything, the minister of higher education would complain from time to time that the tuition fee increases by the universities were pushing the NSFAS envelope, but the reality is that students were amply funded.

The students for whom the tuition fee increases were becoming a problem were poor students who did not qualify for NSFAS or Funza Lushaka funding, and students from middle-class families (the ‘missing middle’) who could not afford the escalating costs of studying at university. These are the groups among whom the pressure was building, as it was among those students for whom NSFAS had simply run out of funds. But the university protests were often led by middle-class and fully funded students presuming to lead on behalf of their poorer classmates. The vice-chancellor of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) makes a clear distinction between the truly poor and the better-off students:

Prins Nevhutalu: You hear all the time the discourse that informs the discussion around fee increases focused on UCT and Wits. It’s all about a ‘missing middle’, but parading it in the name of the poor students. So my argument to Max [Price] and Adam [Habib] is, you absolutely have no need for posturing. We carry the burden of the largest numbers of poor students. You cannot argue on behalf of poor students. Argue about your own institution and say you need more money from the state, but don’t hide behind the poverty of black people. The protests about fees originated on campuses that for me were not facing the harsh reality of poverty.

There is no question that the problem of inadequate NSFAS funding hits the poor the hardest, even as the burden has spread to middle-class students as well. And with every year that tuition fees increased beyond the rise in earnings of families in a stagnant economy, the predictable perfect storm came closer. In response to these pressures, frustration would push students into desperate acts. Put simply, fee increases on campuses compounded struggles with poverty in communities.

Lourens van Staden: And the way we allocate NSFAS, you give students money for certain things like tuition and often maybe for textbooks, as an example. But students also need to eat. If you are poor, where will you eat? At TUT we have a strong academic development support unit where our psychologist conducted some studies. There’s a lot of prostitution, a lot of our boys are stealing in town. You find them when you drive out in the evening. Why are they doing that? Some of them are really just acting criminally because they do it to have beautiful things and so on. We did the research. But others simply do not have a meal. So for me, those who are enrolled are having a tough time experiencing equality in terms of a full stomach, or the necessary resources like textbooks or to get access to electronic resource centres, or to have a proper laptop or whatever. I mean the tools, that’s imperative. And now you don’t eat. It’s a vicious cycle. It’s not conducive for [poor students]. And then in our case, the ones that we send home by the thousands, what happens to them? And you know, often TUT is not the preferred institution among prospective students because of all the disruptions. So we might be the last resort. Still the financial issues matter to poor students here. I am not saying we should have fee-free education, because that would have disastrous implications. Just look at what happened elsewhere in Africa.

So what did universities do?

If the narrative of student protestors is to be believed, universities and their leaders are singularly unresponsive to these four intersecting crises (subsidies down, fees up; enrolments up, throughput rates down). ‘Tell me,’ I asked one of the student leaders in a moment of exasperation during the #FeesMustFall protests, ‘what is it that you asked that we did not do?’ The question was rhetorical, because at UFS we went out of our way to address every material and intellectual need of our students. My directive to my senior team was simple: do not fight with students or workers on things we can agree on. And so when the invasion of the rugby field happened (problem one) and the assault that followed (problem 2), the principal of a Cape Town university called me and said: ‘Of all the universities, and all you’ve done, this should not have happened to UFS.’ We all thought so, and we were devastated by a faction within the SRC leadership who claimed that, after decades, ‘nothing had changed at UFS’. Fortunately, virtually everyone connected to the university knew better.

UFS was fortunate to have a council that took pride in its commitment to have one of the lowest fee structures in the country. This meant that even though UFS did more than most institutions in terms of academic innovation – such as the compulsory 101 core curriculum and the funded study-abroad programme for undergraduates – the institution ran a tight ship, keeping its fees low and its staff remuneration at 53 per cent of expenditure regardless of the fluctuating levels of the annual subsidy. If any university had a pro-poor fee structure, it was UFS. But you would not know that from the fierce protests of 2015–2016.

Like many other universities, Stellenbosch University (SU) used its own internal funds to add substantially to the government’s loan and bursary allocations in order to meet the expanding needs of a growing student population. According to its leader, SU managed a total of R658,7 million in student bursaries, of which R155 million came from within its own funds, thereby covering 24 per cent of its total student body. With an on-average poorer student body, UFS covered 47 per cent of its student body, with R48,4 million coming out of institutional funds from a total of R427 million available for financial assistance. More than anything else, these institution-held funds directed to student funding signalled commitment to poor students, for such money could easily have been deployed in running the general operations of the university.

In addition, as indicated earlier, universities often stretch the ‘payment due’ dates to enable students and their families to raise the funds needed for studies. Most parents eventually find some funding to cover historical debt from previous years and current obligations in the present year of study. Invariably, this has an impact on the cash-flow status of a university and could lead to serious crises with regards to payroll. But universities go to the line to enable families to come up with funding, which serves both the student, enabling him or her to study, and the institution, enabling it to operate.

Many universities have a variety of textbook ‘buy-back’ schemes to help students purchase books cheaply. (This sometimes becomes a racket, with all kinds of instant entrepreneurs willing to scam desperate students.) Students share books. Publishers increasingly offer online and cheaper mass-purchase options. Students themselves organise book-return sales. Lecturers rely on book notes placed on Blackboard or other technology platforms. These schemes, with or without university facilitation, enable students to access expensive books without which they would find it hard to prepare for assignments, tests, and examinations.

Since the 1990s there is hardly a university without a centre for teaching and learning, or some centralised facility that provides additional tutorial classes; coaching in academic writing skills, study skills, and note-taking skills; sessions on reading and preparing for assignments; and countless other interventions that help bridge students from schoolwork to university studies. Academic support programmes of varying ideologies and approaches sprang up everywhere decades ago, and some universities have set up whole campuses to enable students with weak school results to do a bridging year before applying for degree studies.

Free or subsidised food schemes are often provided to cater for students in dire financial need. Some universities have gone further, providing free health services and even gym or fitness centres. In other words, universities across the country have gone to the wire to provide from within their own resources the people, resources, and facilities to meet students’ emotional, nutritional, intellectual, and financial needs.

In the end, it did not matter, for what protesting students were looking for was something much more fundamental: the resolution of a systemic failure in the funding of higher education. All other remedies were dismissed as well-meaning but misguided, even if a massive safety net was now in place for vulnerable students. But that systemic failure went beyond universities – it was, fundamentally, a critique of post-1994 society itself and the failure of the state to live up to societal expectations of what the ‘new South Africa’ was supposed to be.