JOHANNESBURG - It’s been 11 years since the Fees Must Fall movement fought for a free tertiary education.
An education expert warns of impending social conflict if young people continue to be excluded from higher education.
Ahead of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address, student bodies are renewing calls to tax the wealthy and big business to fund free education.
The 2016 Fees Must Fall protests reignited the battle for accessible higher education, they reshaped the debate on its costs, highlighting a system still beyond the reach of many who are poor.
While the combative student militancy of the Fees Must Fall era has waned over the years, those still within the system argue that the reforms introduced since then have been largely cosmetic.
Through the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, government provides non-repayable bursaries to qualifying students from households earning R350,000 or less per year.
But questions remain over how far government can stretch the public purse to fund universal fee-free higher education.
A Professor of Education at the University of Johannesburg says something’s got to give.
“I mean, the present situation is really untenable. You know thousands of students are still turned away and many of them are drowning in debt, actually," said Salim Valley.
"And the bottom line really is that no student who meets the requirements for admission to a university course should be excluded for financial reasons.”
Valley warns that the continued exclusion of many young people from higher education could soon have serious consequences.
“If we neglect these young people, it’s going to cause more social conflict, it’ll cause very far from the social cohesion people talk about, it’s going to reproduce inequality, where the rich can send their children to private institutions or overseas etc, so we’ve realise that higher eduction is not a commodity, it’s actually a human right.”
While the Constitution guarantees the right to basic education, the state is only obliged to progressively realise access to higher education through reasonable measures.
- eNCA’s Moloko Moloto reports.