I am sure that the founders of our democracy could not have imagined in the 1950s that their memorable declaration in the Freedom Charter that “the doors of learning and culture shall be open,” would run into some heavy concrete walls in the 2020s, shutting out tens of thousands of school and university students.
Somewhere in January it was reported that 23,000 learners in four provinces were unplaced — 2,700 in the Western Cape and in 7,000 in Gauteng. Many of the unplaced are in grades 1 and 8, the start of primary and high school, respectively.
Provinces tend to blame parents for late, last-minute and incomplete applications. Parents complain of bureaucracy and being turned away repeatedly after standing in long queues from early morning or getting no responses from schools at all.
What is going on? A few things.
On the one hand, it is true: parents often start the process when most schools have already filled their quotas for the year. This is partly because of a lack of information about basics such as due dates, and partly because of bad habits: why rush when eventually almost everybody gets accommodated even if not in their choice of school? To take on more late-application learners, from a schools perspective, is to overcrowd classrooms.
On the other hand, it is also true that the problem of unplaced learners happens every single year.
My question to the provinces is simple: where is the planning? Surely by now you would have been able to use basic statistics to plot application trends over time and allocate places and resources accordingly?
What the provinces do not tell you is that there is no money. It is not as simple as building more schools, it is about the millions of rand it takes to fully staff and resource new plants. And unless you’ve been asleep, there have been some very severe budget cuts recently.
The doors will also be shut close for more than 100,000 university students. The problem is that 345,000 students obtained bachelor’s passes (8,700 more than last year), but total spaces available are about 230,000 (33,000 more than in 2025).
At Wits, there is place for 6,000 first years when 86,000 applied, and at UCT, there are 4,500 places for more than 98,000 applicants. What is going on?
A few other things.
This is partly the result of a non-discriminatory (in a statistical sense) examination system. It is too easy to pass and the result is this mess. How do we know? Because many of these first years will fail or drop out and a small number do the degree in the minimum time.
This senseless celebration about ever-increasing NSC results might inflate political egos, but it is destroying the hopes of students who really believed that they are, on the basis of a bachelor’s pass, university ready.
As one who teaches in both school and university, it is far too easy to blame universities: if a university student cannot read a book without faltering or write a letter without errors (ChatGPT to the rescue) or do basic maths in a science major, then that problem has deep roots in the school system.
Nor is the solution simply to re-direct students to TVET colleges or other post-secondary institutions. Until those institutions raise their own standards and are adequately resourced in personnel and equipment, they will remain unattractive, reinforcing our colonial commonsense that ‘working with your hands’ happens in technical or vocational colleges; that of course is nonsense.
What are some solutions?
For schools, provinces need to bring expertise around the table and plan for increased enrolments against historic trends with the requisite budgets in place. It requires the elite public and private schools to share the burden of added enrolments of the working classes and the poor; they have and can build more classrooms and fund more teachers.
Racial and class segregation needs to end. They need to run campaigns among parents with less access to information about what they need to do against deadlines throughout the year.
For universities, demand from the department of basic education that the standard for a bachelor’s pass is immediately raised. Bring Universities South Africa (USAf), the body of university heads, into this discussion since they have influence in this regard. This senseless celebration about ever-increasing NSC results might inflate political egos, but it is destroying the hopes of students who really believed that they are, on the basis of a bachelor’s pass, university ready.
Our biggest mistake would be to build more and more universities. That would simply compound the problem. We do not have the professorial expertise to staff new institutions nor do we have the quality of students to occupy them or the NSFAS budgets to support them. Doing so would simply accelerate the race to the bottom.
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