Call-up for graduates

All graduates - irrespective of whether their education was privately funded or paid for through the National Student Financial Aid Scheme - might soon be forced to undertake a year of community service.

This is according to the ANC national executive committee's sub-committee on education and health, which said yesterday that it would implement the proposal in the next five years.

Committee chairman Naledi Pandor, the home affairs minister, and committee member Mduduzi Manana, deputy minister of higher education and training, tried to allay graduates' fears that they would be forced to postpone their entry into the labour market to undertake compulsory menial work in the public service.

They said graduates would spend a year gaining experience relevant to what they had studied.

"This would not be in-service training," said Manana.

At the ANC's elective conference in Mangaung, Free State, in December 2012, delegates of the conference's education and health commission resolved that consideration "must be given to a graduate tax for all graduates from higher education institutions".

The tax was intended to bolster the coffers of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, which was expected to play a bigger role in the state's plans for free education for all undergraduate s.

The tax proposal was scrapped after a huge outcry.

The ANC committee proposed that community service first be imposed on all graduate students who had received bursaries or loans from an aid scheme and later on all graduates.

The idea has drawn mixed reactions, with some commentators giving it the green light on condition it is properly implemented.

Professor Servaas van der Berg, of Stellenbosch University , dismissed the idea as "sub-optimal" and derided it as a waste of valuable time.

"It will not work. All it would do is postpone the period within which one would have entered the labour market by a year," said Van der Berg.

"People will be . put in jobs in which they will be under-utilised."

And the notion that there is a large number of unemployed graduates with degrees who need practical training to find a job had been exaggerated, Van der Berg said.

He noted that Stats SA's labour force survey showed that the number of degreed graduates in employment was about 55000.

However, it showed that about 340000 graduates, including holders of diplomas and certificates, were without a job in 2011.

Education specialist Graeme Bloch conditionally supported the idea.

For the whole thing to be workable there would have to be skills transference, he said.

There would be additional strain on the fiscus because graduates would get a stipend for their year in public service.

Bloch suggested that funds assigned to the Expanded Public Works Programme be redirected to the community service initiative.

Luzuko Buku, general secretary of the SA Students' Congress, said he did not know "where the money will emerge from".

"Whatever its make-up, there must be consultation [with graduates] and people should not be forced to work in unbearable conditions."

Bloch predicted that students would not like the idea but urged them to see the positive side.

"You have to use your degree to give back," Bloch said.