Those students who, from this year, will benefit from the state's offer of free higher education, will have to perform a minimum of 80 hours community service a year "to inculcate a culture of giving back".
So says an internal Department of Higher Education document, which stipulates that the community service will kick in during a student's second year and must be performed annually until the student graduates.
Some examples of service that students can do include assisting in environment clean-ups and reading stories to, or playing games with, young children at early-childhood development centres.
They could also assist early-grade teachers by listening to young children read; visit old-age homes and spend time with old people; assist nursing staff at clinics and hospitals; or volunteer at libraries or in community watch programmes.
Students can perform these services during their vacation, over weekends or in the mornings or afternoons when they do not have classes, according to the document, which the Sunday Times has seen.
A spokesman for the department, Madikwe Mabotha, said: "The issue is about making sure people who are benefiting from taxpayers' money give back to the country."
Mabotha said the idea of getting students to do community service was "taken from all the inputs that were made at the Heher commission".
The commission, chaired by retired Judge Jonathan Heher, investigated whether the government could provide free higher education.
Mabotha said students would have to submit a participation report signed by the manager of the volunteer programme before they could get funding for the following year.
A further condition was that after graduation, students had to remain in the country and "participate in the economy in whichever way is most opportune for them for at least the number of years they have been funded".
Those who wanted to emigrate permanently would be required to pay back the money.
Other conditions include meeting minimum performance standards, such as attending lectures and obtaining satisfactory test results.
Students must pass at least half of their courses in their first year of study and finish their qualification within "the minimum number of years plus one". This means they may only fail one year.
From this year new students will be eligible for free higher education if they come from households with annual incomes of less than R350,000, according to a surprise announcement made by President Jacob Zuma last month.
Mabotha said 14,674 prospective students, who had not applied for a place at higher education institutions last year, had since applied through the department's online application portal known as the Central Applications Clearing House.
The top three preferred provinces for study were Gauteng (5,165 applications), KwaZulu-Natal (2,786) and the Eastern Cape (1,893).
The EFF student wing has urged matriculants, no matter when they finished school, to apply for places. But several institutions, including North-West University, the University of Pretoria and Stellenbosch University, said they would not accept late applications.
Cape Peninsula University of Technology spokeswoman Lauren Kansley said late applicants would only be entertained from January 24 to February 2, once the registration of those students who had applied on time had been processed.
"We expect our engineering and applied science faculties to be the most likely to have spaces available. We have spaces for 9,878 first-year students and roughly 9,395 of those have already been allocated."
Willa de Ruyter, spokeswoman for the Tshwane University of Technology, said the university had started accepting late applications online from last Monday.
"At that time, just over 1,000 spaces were still available. We are processing these applications. However, most courses are now fully subscribed."
Zandile Mbabela, spokeswoman for Nelson Mandela University, said 600 late applications had been received by Wednesday, while the vice-chancellor of Sol Plaatje University in the Northern Cape, Professor Yunus Ballim, said they had received 400 late requests for applications since Monday.
"We have been able to accept applications from 60 of these and they are being considered for possible offers of admission."
Registration at the Capricorn TVET College in Limpopo was suspended this week following a stampede in which several prospective students were injured...