Righting an inverted pyramid : managing a perfect storm

Abstract

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.