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Universities are facing a major shake-up that will result in the creation of a three-tier system comprising universities, university colleges and higher education colleges.
In a bid to increase access to universities, the department of higher education and training is revamping the system to introduce higher education colleges that will churn out undergraduate degrees. It is also creating university colleges that will cater for some but not all programmes offered by mainstream universities.
Dianne Parker, deputy director-general for universities in the department, told City Press on the sidelines of the higher education transformation summit in Durban that the restructuring would eliminate unnecessary competition among universities by forcing them to focus on different academic areas.
Higher education colleges, she said, would focus only on offering undergraduate qualifications.
“Their staff may do their own research, but the focus as an institution will not be research. Their focus will be teaching. They will be offering certificates, higher certificates, advanced certificates, diplomas, advanced diplomas, degrees, and a whole range of those in specific fields. They will not offer honours programmes, and won’t have a research profile,” she said.
University colleges, Parker said, would operate at a higher level than higher education colleges.
“We are talking about a mechanism that will enable new universities to be born. The University of Cape Town and Wits University were all university colleges when they started. A university college is an evolutionary model for institutions. It differs from a higher education college in that it is working towards becoming a university.”
This will be the second major higher education revamp since 1994. A merger process undertaken in the mid-2000s resulted in the reduction of universities to 23 and the incorporation of smaller ones into bigger institutions.
But the merger process was heavily criticised for focusing largely on historically disadvantaged institutions, while leaving established universities such as Wits, Rhodes and Stellenbosch largely untouched.
Parker said the aim of the shake-up this time around was to create a system where universities were not competing to offer the same programmes or attract the same calibre of student.
“The scope of these is that they offer a full range of services. They offer postgraduate, undergraduate, they do community service, and they get into research at different levels and some of them will be more intensive than others.
“We want a situation where everybody has an area of speciality.”
Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande told City Press last month that they wanted universities to focus on specific areas of specialisation, usually linked with the main economic activity of their geographical location.
For example, Nzimande said, the University of Zululand – which is near the Richards Bay coal terminal – could have a hi-tech school of engineering incorporated into it, which would benefit the coal terminal.
Parker said they were toying with the idea of stripping some of the universities of a number of their campuses and converting these into higher education colleges and university colleges.
“One of those campuses could turn into a higher education college or a university college, depending on its location, who it serves, what it actually does and what it needs to do. We want a diversity of programmes to create opportunities for people,” she said.
Work to reconfigure the institutions will begin as soon as Parliament passes the Higher Education Amendment Bill. The bill is currently before Parliament.
Parker said they had not yet put a time on completion of the restructuring. She could also not indicate at this stage which of the existing universities would lose campuses or be converted into university colleges or higher education colleges.
Wits vice-chancellor Adam Habib welcomed the move, saying such a restructuring to create institutions that offer different programmes was long overdue.
“Currently, there is too much competition and it is undermining what we are all trying to do. We need a differentiated system,” he said.
But he warned against what he called “re-racialising” the higher education landscape into a model that existed before the mergers.
“We have to make sure we don’t replicate the divides of the past because many of the institutions have changed,” Habib said.
University of Johannesburg vice-chancellor Ihron van Rensburg was also excited about the move. He said differentiating universities would expand access to higher education.
“We welcome the expansion of the range of institution types. It will ensure we take pressure off existing institutions. The demand for increased access is high. The National Development Plan’s goal is to have close to 2 million people accessing higher education every year by 2030. We won’t be able to do that with the existing institutions.”
Will the addition of higher education colleges and university colleges lead to increased access to higher education as envisaged by the department.
Error: Please note that an incorrect graphic on university fees increases accompanied this article in the City Press newspaper. The correct graphic will be published as soon as the figures are available.
