JONATHAN JANSEN | Profit and greed plague private education, but don’t write it off yet

The minister’s decision last week to deregister four Educor brands (Damelin, City Varsity, Lyceum College and Icesa City Campus) is, on the face of it, a good one. It can be defended by provisions in the Higher Education Act. The department followed due process, giving the company several opportunities to meet outstanding obligations such as the timely submission of annual financial statements. And officials responded to a flood of criticism from fee-paying students about concerns such as the quality of education and the qualifications of staff. Good.

There’s just one problem: if that same standard of judgment was applied to public higher education institutions, then universities like Unisa would have been disbanded by now. Is this not a case of double standards in which private education is held to a different standard than public universities? Of course, the minister has tried to place Unisa under administration, but as yet, there are no signs that the hammer has fallen on South Africa’s largest university. Why not?

Because Unisa has political cover at the highest levels; make no mistake, there are powerful political actors working to undermine the decision to take over governance and/or management functions at the Pretoria university. Any university that names academic entities after a former president (also now its chancellor) is clearly not serious about its autonomy and independence from nationalist politics. Unisa has certainly failed its mission by not placing its academic project above partisan politics.

I nevertheless recognise the value of private education in democracy. It gives citizens choices. It recognises those who cherish independent education.

Educor has no such political backing. It blundered its way into incompetence and left thousands of students stranded in the process. And its response to ministerial intervention? The request for one extension after another to get its house in order and respond to government concerns about the mess it has created. It was always politically vulnerable as a private education initiative in the eye of a government that has scant regard for non-public education. In the end, greed was its undoing as it took the money of mainly desperate students without giving in return the high-quality education and facilities that every registered student deserves whether in private or public education.

The real damage of the Educor debacle is that it placed legitimate private education under added suspicion even though that sector is thriving by all accounts in respect of higher education. Since it receives no state funding, private education has to balance two sensitive and potentially damaging imperatives: how to optimise revenue from student fees and how to provide quality education at the same time. Unscrupulous providers will get that balance wrong by hiking up fees as much as possible while scaling down costly inputs such as academic staff salaries. Charge more and pay out less, in other words. The Educor brands got that balance wrong and the complaints came flooding in.

As a public education activist, I nevertheless recognise the value of private education in democracy. It gives citizens choices. It recognises those who cherish independent education. It allows for an expansion of the curriculum beyond state requirements. And it provides a competitive standard against which to measure public education.

But I have over the years also seen the dark side of private education. The relentless drive to increase profits. The disregard for students when greed overwhelms managers. There are people who build up private education schools or colleges and then sell them off at huge profits to the highest bidder, making individuals very wealthy. In a perfect world, I suppose that’s called entrepreneurship. But I have never been convinced that the bid to enrich yourself and the commitment to giving young people the highest quality education is easily reconciled around the same table.

What does the future of higher education look like 20 years from now? Private or public? I am going to stick my neck out here and predict that the private sector will gradually take more and more students away from public higher education. These will be middle class and mainly white students whose parents have the ability to pay. The more the regular public universities remain unstable with annualised running battles between students, management and an irredeemably corrupt NSFAS, the more the traditional institutions will mainly become places of study for the black poor. Nothing wrong with that, of course, except the money will go elsewhere and build up competitive infrastructures over time (such as for engineering) and then, guess what, private education becomes the preferred working place for established professors in decaying public institutions.

I sincerely hope I am wrong, but I doubt it.