Should universities provide students with accommodation? My answer is no, but before you dismiss me as a heartless brute, let’s at the very least think about this rather than choke on your Thursday morning Weetbix.
Obligatory student accommodation is a question we do not think about or do not want to think about because how you answer that question goes to the heart of a question we seldom talk about: what kind of society do we want to be?
The question struck me very powerfully these past two weeks when stories came in of students sleeping in the corridors of our universities because of a lack of accommodation on campuses across the country from north to south. Those universities who experience this problem every year are simply incompetent in the disciplines of management. We talk so much about leadership in the higher education literature and in popular reports on crises around failing vice-chancellors, but we seldom reflect on the management capacities of our universities. That simple, perhaps even simplistic aphorism came to mind as I witnessed the chaos around student accommodation: those who fail to plan, plan to fail. This problem can be managed, and I have seen that done effortlessly by universities who take planning seriously.
The modern university is not a giant welfare organisation or an extension of the state’s grant system.
Institutions would argue, with some merit, that students come anyway, no matter what you tell them in correspondence. Fair enough, but then you need to implement your decisions and not buckle at the first sign of a toyi-toyi. Because if you do, the students will press their luck year after year after year because of weak-kneed management.
The modern university is not a giant welfare organisation or an extension of the state’s grant system. Its primary role is to provide students with a solid education. So what about accommodation for students without means and from the deep rural areas? I believe that the NSFAS system does provide adequately — if they were not so corrupt — for students to have access to funds for accommodation. But that is a very different matter from demanding that “management” provide every student with residence facilities on campus.
First of all, accommodating everyone is impossible given the massive explosion in student numbers in recent years, something not helped by the inflation in bachelor passes in the 2023 National Senior Certificate results. Most students should, with the resources provided by government, find their own accommodation on or around campuses. Yes, you might say, but what about expensive cities like Stellenbosch where private student accommodation rivals the price of major surgery. Or places like Rhodes where there is very little by way of urban infrastructure for quality housing.
I believe in those cases the university has two options. Limit the number of students enrolled and not give in to the pressure from students or the greed from managers to grow beyond what your facilities can accommodate; or build new residences off-campus at affordable prices ideally through public-private partnerships. The farther away those residences are from campus, the need for transportation of course becomes another budget item to plan for.
My concern is a different one. It is the expectation, actually the demand, that the university must provide me with accommodation because it is the new nanny that should continue to grant me everything, from food, to toiletries, spending money and condoms. Take care of me, in other words. There are university managers who told me recently that students in some institutions are now demanding that management must get them jobs. You gave me a degree, the logic goes, so you are obliged to get me a job. Put differently, why did you waste my time with all this training if you cannot guarantee my employment security?
Can you see where this is going?
I am on record as giving away much of my personal money to undergraduate student support. I do that with great joy because I want to share what I have been blessed with. But if any of the students on my support roster start demanding that support as an obligation, I will tell them to jump in the Vaal River where they will at least float on the thick layers of water hyacinths.
The danger is dependence and this mindset will destroy our culture and our economy. To look for housing is a good thing. To search for a job has its own rewards. To experience frustration on the path to getting what you want is called life. But when everything is handed to you, you become entitled and that will be the end of all of us.
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