THE Northern Cape and Mpumalanga were to get universities, Department of Higher Education and Training director-general Prof Mary Metcalfe said on Friday.
“There is no plan or time frame (but there is) political commitment.”
Parliament’s portfolio committee on higher education was to start work on exploring the idea, committee chairman Marius Fransman said.
The committee would look at the practicalities, from the number of potential students and the type of programmes to be offered, to garnering a sense of what work the department had already done, he said.
The two provinces — the only ones without public universities — had national institutes of higher education and the government had been working on increasing their capacity, Metcalfe said.
The Northern Cape institute was established in 2003 and the Mpumalanga one in 2006, both as statutory co-ordinating bodies for higher education provisions in the provinces.
Higher Education SA CEO Prof Duma Malaza said there was “not much that is negative” in the idea of establishing more universities , especially as SA’s 23 universities were overcrowded.
“There is pressure in terms of space and this will widen access,” he said.
At the African National Congress’s 2007 Polokwane conference, the party made education and the development of rural areas two of its five most pressing priorities.
Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande’s spokesman, Mfanafuthi Sithebe, said the plan had to be seen in this context and that the department was exploring ways of widening access to post-school education, from reopening the agricultural, education and nursing colleges to taking on the sectoral education and training authorities (Setas).
The Setas are to officially move to the department by November 1.
Establishing all these institutions would widen access to higher education and stimulate the rural areas, Sithebe said.
Malaza said benchmarking the new institutions against established ones and ensuring quality would have to be carefully considered.
Metcalfe said it would take time to develop credible universities for each of the two provinces, but there had already been collaboration between the national institutes of higher education and SA’s established universities, which would pave the way .
Often the best way to set up new universities was to start by first establishing “branches” of established universities and move on from there, Malaza said.
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