The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) exists to provide financial aid to eligible students at the country’s 50 public Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges and 26 universities. According to its mission statement, it supports access to and success in higher education and training for students from poor and working-class families who would otherwise not be able to afford to study.
Undoubtedly, NSFAS is playing an invaluable role, providing access to millions of students from poor and working-class families to higher education institutions. This year the accommodation allowance per student a year was capped at R45,000, while for the first time a R6,000 living allowance was made available to students at TVET colleges.
The planned TVET enrolment for this year is 556,415 students and universities are expected to enrol more than 1.1m students, including 208,299 first-time entering students. Up until January, NSFAS received a total of 1,131,419 applications for the bursary, including 156,700 from students who are South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) beneficiaries. These students automatically qualify for the bursary. Students whose combined gross household income is R350,000 per annum are also eligible for the bursary. It is very important to bear this admission criterion in mind. While offering it to those students whose combined gross household income is above R350,000 per annum, the so-called “missing middle” students, would certainly be a good thing, it would open the floodgates. Currently, there is no funding from government for “missing middle” students.
It is therefore mind-boggling how NSFAS “possibly allocated” more than R5.1bn “in the earlier academic years up to 2019” to more than 40,000 students in 76 institutions who did not qualify to be funded.
It is unforgivable that a state entity which is projected to spend R47.6bn in funding allocation, this year dished out more than R5.1bn to more than 40,000 students who did not qualify for the bursary.
According to a statement issued by the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) on Tuesday, these were students whose household income was above R350,000 “and therefore would not qualify for NSFAS funding based on the funding rules”.
The statement read: “These students did not submit their parents’ details upon application and therefore the means test was not properly conducted.”
The SIU presented its findings to parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa). The SIU said its investigation showed that NSFAS failed to design and implement controls that would ensure that there is an annual reconciliation between the funds disbursed to the institutions and the funded list of registered students. It said this control weakness led to overpayments and underpayments of funds to the different institutions.
It is unforgivable that a state entity which is projected to spend R47.6bn in funding allocation, this year dished out more than R5.1bn to more than 40,000 students who did not qualify for the bursary. The qualifying criteria are pretty simple: a combined gross household income of R350,000 a year. It is criminal that the means test was not properly conducted because students did not submit their parents’ details.
However, in response to the SIU statement, NSFAS said it was based on cases where applicants falsified their application information to unduly benefit from the scheme. “It was prevalent at the time when the scheme could not verify the information through third party source data, such as the department of home affairs and the South African Revenue Services. These verifications have now been embedded in the NSFAS verification process since 2020.”
NSFAS went on to say that when the SIU started its work, it (NSFAS) had already initiated a process to de-fund these students and pursue recovery. A pertinent question to ask is how much of the R5.1bn has been recovered by NSFAS. Could this R5.1bn payment to undeserving students have resulted in genuine applications for the bursary being turned down because of the lack of funding?
NSFAS cannot simply sit back and blame the R5.1bn payment it made on applicants who falsified their application information. Surely more rigorous checks and balances should have been in place. The least that NSFAS can do is to get staff responsible for this colossal mistake to be held to account. Public confidence in this important organ of state must not be allowed to wane.
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