There is a severe disjoint between the higher education sector and the broader economy.
This is evident in the large pool university graduates (estimated at 15%) that remain unemployed, despite their best efforts.
The fault for this situation can be ascribed to a few stakeholders and policy decisions. One of the main ones is recruitment policies in the public service, where an undergraduate degree remains an important qualifier (the ubiquitous M+ system).
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This encourages students with ‘Bachelors’ matric passes to enrol for any available courses, and we see the result of this in the unemployed BA ‘generalist’ graduates. The other is the structure and management and implementation of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme(NSFAS), more on this later.
Finally, the attitude of parents and families to higher education courses other than those provided by universities needs to change: only university graduates are regarded as successful, TVETs and other skills based providers are looked down upon.
In my view, the funding provided by NSFAS is the single most powerful transformative tool that can turn this situation around.
Firstly, the policy of funding any and all qualifying candidates purely on the basis of their matric results is flawed. Funding must be linked to the field of study selected to begin narrowing the identified skills gaps in the economy.
Secondly, funding recipients must be held to account in terms of their academic performance: strict annual assessment criteria must be invoked, to ensure that students achieve the highest possible scores, in the allocated time frames. This will vastly improve the employability of graduates, while also addressing the constraints on the economy.
Thirdly, the study opportunities available at TVET colleges needs to more widely circulated. Indeed, a case could be made to incentivise enrolment at TVET colleges.
While on this point, TVET colleges need to return to their core mandate of providing technical and vocational courses. They should immediately cease to offer courses in the likes of human resources, public management and marketing.
Government also needs to allow higher education institutions much more autonomy in the development of their curricula, and enrolment of students. This will lead in time to the development of more specialised institutions, such as the Michigan Institute of Technology (MIT) in the USA, but also allow them to react more quickly to the cycle of development in the country.
To put it another way, we as a developing economy need more engineers, boilermakers and machinists and fewer BA generalist graduates, and universities will align themselves with these needs if they are given the freedom to.
In many ways, this is a typical ‘Catch 22’ situation in that the economy urgently needs a wide range of skills to grow.
Vijay Naidoo is the CEO of the Port Shepstone Business Forum. He writes in his personal capacity. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication.
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