For our own sakes, let's fix the fees crisis

It's 2036. You have been admitted to the South African Democracy Memorial Hospital for a routine procedure.

"What year did you graduate?" you inquire innocently of your 40-something anaesthetist.

"2017," comes the reply.

"Oh," you say groggily as the pre-meds kick in. "That was the year the universities fell apart, wasn't it?"

And as you drift off to an uneasy sleep you wonder which part of the course the person who holds your life in their hands completed that year. But it's too late to worry about that now. You are well on your way to oblivion.

South Africa's fees issue will have a direct impact on you at some point. It doesn't help to ignore it.

Fees must fall.

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Of that there is no doubt. But they won't fall in the way the loudest voices in the debate want them to, because if they do, the quality of the education students receive will reflect its diminishing global value.

We must tackle the brutal reality that quality education is out of the reach of too many capable but economically disadvantaged youth.

With public sector corruption a national pastime and even seemingly legitimate government spending hard to account for, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan is going to be hard-pressed to find the money to ensure that those in need of support are able to get it without their being an undue burden on another part of state spending.

Some 70% of university students stand to benefit from new proposals that will cap fees at 2015 rates and limit universities to increasing the cost of education by no more than 8%. Estimates put the bill to fund the shortfall for next year at R2.6-billion, and that is without addressing the chief demand by increasingly fractious students - free higher education for all. That, according to a recent PwC report, would cost in the region of R50-billion a year.

Any kind of financial support will remove money from another government budget.

With the government apparently hellbent on spending as much as R1-trillion on a secret nuclear build, excluding cost overruns and future clean-ups, it has to come from somewhere and will require some pricey trade-offs if it is to placate an increasingly militant student body.

One never wants to give tax authorities an excuse to extract more revenue from an already stretched base of people honest enough to declare their incomes, but here is a suggestion that might just gain some traction.

This column has previously suggested that the government's proposed sugar tax does not go far enough. It's considering a tax on soft drinks but a tax at source, from a revenue point of view, is far more efficient and would have a far bigger impact on public health if it encouraged food producers to reduce the amount of sugar they toss into everything from sauces to cereals and convenience foods.

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British politician Peter Hain, who grew up in South Africa, was appointed recently as a visiting lecturer at the Wits Business School. He has done work on the feasibility of a graduates' tax to fund education needs. Anyone who has benefit ed from a tertiary education would be liable for the additional tax.

You might provide only the incentive of a state-supported education for particular disciplines.

Short of anaesthetists? Help fund their learning. Short of accountants who can't pay their way? Draw up a watertight contract that has them serve the equivalent of a year or two on a lower-paid internship after graduation in the same way medical students have for years.

Got a better idea? Share it. We need a plan. And we need it now. Especially if we are going to build those nuclear power stations.

If we don't produce our own graduates to run them, we will have a problem. And if you are at the scene of a nuclear waste spill and end up in the hands of a medical graduate from circa 2017, who are you going to blame as you drift off to sleep?

Whitfield is a financial journalist, broadcaster and writer as well as a public speaker on the political economy