Wits vice-chancellor Adam Habib talks about how the university is handling the immediate challenges of the funding crisis, and some ideas for a long-term solution.
Adam Habib is Wits University vice-chancellor.
BUSINESS DAY TV: The 2017 academic year has kicked off at Wits University. After last year’s protests and disruptions the situation seems pretty stable, despite most universities pushing through an 8% increase in tuition fees for the year.
So has the issue of fees now been resolved or is this the calm before the storm? Wits vice-chancellor Adam Habib joins us now in the News Leader studio. Adam … all calm on the western campus, or the western front so to speak? Do you expect it to remain so or do you still expect some push-back this year?
ADAM HABIB: For now it’s all calm, we’re now five weeks into operations and we’ve had no significant protest. I think … it really does depend on what happens in the broader political environment that will determine how events actually play out within the university. The fees issues are three separate matters.
One is the 8%, which as you know, government has agreed to pay for all of those under R600,000 [households].…
BDTV: The missing middle?
MT: The missing middle. The second issue is first fee registration, where you have to pay R9,500 at Wits on the first day of registration. We’ve said that those who can pay must pay, those who can’t pay have to sign an acknowledgment of debt and we’ll allow them to register. And then the third is historic debt, in which there are two categories. The NSFAS [National Student Financial Aid Scheme] students, those with a family income of less than R122,000 — for them we’ve asked government for a guarantee, and government did give a guarantee. And so we registered them. But for the missing middle, with their debt we asked government for a guarantee and they said they couldn’t, there just weren’t the resources.
BDTV: So what do you have to do now, do you have to carry that debt?
MT: What we’ve done with those students, is we’ve said to them, those who have a debt of less than R10,000 we’ve rolled it into the 2017 fee and let them register. Those with above R10,000 must pay 50% and we will enter into a payment plan for the remainder. So we’ve gone as far as we can go. Anything else I would be violating both my fiduciary responsibility, the Higher Education Act which asks me to be sustainable, and the National Credit Act, which makes it mandatory that I only provide debt to people who can pay debt. And so that’s where we are. We’ve gone as far as we can, we’ve explained it to students and that’s where the matter stands.
But the real question is going to depend on when the final proposals emerge on how we’re going to refinance our education because I do think we really need to rethink the financing of higher education.
BDTV: What sort of discussions are you having with government in that regard at the moment? Because we have the state of the nation address coming up later this week, where the matter could be addressed. We also have the national budget later this month and obviously funding issues again coming into the equation there. Are you having these discussions with the Department of Higher Education?
MT: We have had multiple sets of discussions. With the Department of Higher Education we’ve really focused our discussions on the immediate, what to do with immediate effect to stabilise the situation for 2017. For the long-term refinancing, there have been a number of conversations happening. There is a group of facilitators led by Dikgang Moseneke, the former deputy chief justice, the chancellor of Wits who is enabling a conversation with students, and there are a whole series of ideas there.
One is the model which is called the Kusasa model by Sizwe Nxasana which is really a banking model, it’s a loan scheme and you collect the money when the student graduates through the tax system. There’s a second model which I obviously thought, introduced by our students at Wits, I was really chuffed at that, some young staff members, Khaya Sithole etcetera, who are looking towards a mechanism for financing higher education that [uses] a graduate tax. So all graduates in the country would pay a tax, an additional tax of 2% that would fund the higher education so that the access to universities is cleared but you’d capture it at the end point when people start working.
BDTV: Do you know exactly what the shortfall may be? Or do you have figures in mind of how much you have to fund?
MT: It really depends how you play it. If you want free tuition in universities, you’re looking at R25bn for everybody, rich and poor, black and white. If you’re looking at accommodation per year, you’re looking at … it’s currently R7bn but to be honest we have a massive shortage of accommodation so you’re looking at R14bn if you’re going to fix that problem. And then if you’re looking at subsistence, you’re looking at another R10bn. Effectively then you’re looking at anything around R50bn per annum in addition to the existing investments.
Now if that’s the case, you have to ask certain questions: why are you putting that in 1-million higher education students, and not in 4-million young people who are unemployed? Or why are you putting it there and not in early childhood development, when all research shows you have to catch people between five and seven if you want to fix the educational crisis? Those are not questions that Adam Habib should resolve — or, for that matter, students. It should be society as a whole that comes to some terms about what those trade-offs are.…
BDTV: The sort of shortfall that you say with this here. and how you aim to actually bridge that shortfall….
MT: This year we will go with a R56m deficit, which is higher than normal but it’s not the first time we did it. Business Day got it wrong, we’ve had deficits before but they were really nominal deficits. I’ll tell you what worries me, however, is that — [in] the budget of a group [like] Wits, at R5.5bn, R56m is not a train smash. But I do worry about the trend. Let me tell you about the trend — on December 31 2015, the year before, we had a debt of R192m, that came down to about R45m to R50m in the course of the year because lots of people pay in January.
On December 31 2016, our debt stood at R405m. Now we will drop that as we did the other one, but if you fell from R192m to R50m you can almost anticipate that you will fall from R405m to somewhere higher and that’s something that we should be worried about. That’s the thing I worry about, the trend and that’s not a Wits phenomenon. You saw UCT in Business Day yesterday saying the same issue. In speaking to all the universities, the trend of debt is going up and that is a dangerous thing. Government needs to resolve this problem soon or we’re going to create an unsustainable situation in the higher education system.
BDTV: Just one question, because I always think that there are not enough people being accommodated at Wits…. What about distance learning? Unisa — why has it fallen off the map as a solution?
MT: Unisa, to be clear, still takes 354,000, some 35%-40% of a million students in higher education system go to Unisa and TED so let’s be cognisant of that. But you’re right, we need start thinking through using online facilities in a much more effective way. Wits is rolling out a big programme in partnership with an organisation called Academic Partners in the next two to three years to start rolling out our degrees online. However, be careful that you don’t recreate the inequality divide. You don’t want poor people to get online education and rich people to get face-to-face education, then you’ve just replicated the economic [divide] … so we’ve got to deal with that but I believe we do need more innovative use of online facilities if we’re going to address the problem.
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