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Righting an inverted pyramid : managing a perfect storm
(Centre for the Study of Southern African Literature and Languages, 2013) Bawa, Ahmed C.
The higher education participation rate in South Africa has been stagnant over the last 20 years and this has resulted in a very substantial gap between graduate supply and demand. The pressure for massification is also a response to other sociopolitical and economic imperatives. Notwithstanding the projections in the Green Paper on Post-School Education, it is argued that the structural inefficiencies in the way in which post-school education is currently structured will prevent massification. A purely speculative model is discussed for the organisation of higher education in KwaZulu-Natal, which it is argued, deals with these structural constraints and inefficiencies. It is proposed as a speculative model because its primary function to demonstrate that there are indeed viable ways to re-think the construction of the post-school education and training system to respond to the material conditions that prevail. The model proposed is a single federal institution of at least 60 existing campuses spread throughout the Province. A necessary condition for the model to work is that it will be a highly differentiated and then strongly articulated, thereby dealing with a rather contested national challenge of differentiation but in the context of meeting the needs of widening access.