Can SA afford free education? If so, how soon? This depends on what we mean by "free education".
The term is sometimes used to describe affordable fees. Others mean that the whole educational experience is free, including meals, accommodation, books, study materials, travel and a stipend for living expenses. Still others mean free tuition: no student would have to pay for their courses. I will focus on free tuition, which is the first step to a fully free educational system and the most achievable policy option in the short term.
The best figures we have for total university fees revenue come from a report published by PwC in 2012. In that year, total fees revenue was R15bn. The South African budget was about R1-trillion. Therefore, to fund tuition for every student at SA’s universities, the government would need to find an additional R15bn per year, on 2012 prices.
The government routinely spends amounts of R15bn. To put the number in perspective, the projected amount to be spent on infrastructure from 2009 to 2030 is R1-trillion.
The costs reduce further when we consider that free education would neither have to reach all students, nor need to be implemented immediately. If we limited it to undergraduate students, this would mean that about 800,000 students, by current numbers, would remain, reducing the funding needed to about R12bn, on 2012 prices.
If we further assume that wealthy students, who make up the top 20% of income earners, would also be excluded, the number reduces further to about 640,000 students or R10bn. Now, instead of needing to raise an additional 1.5% of revenue, the government would only need to raise 1%.
If the programme was limited to students currently on the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS), funding for only 400,000 students would be needed, or about R6bn; R6bn to provide free education to all NSFAS students is an astonishingly low amount.
Yet the amount falls even further if free education is implemented progressively. If the project was piloted in the first year, to 10% of all students, that would cost only R1bn. This would still cover an enormous 100,000 students.
The pilot could be tried at a given number of universities, or it could be implemented in a specific cohort of students, for instance final-year undergraduates. Each year, the project could expand proportionally so the government would only need to raise R3bn per year at most.
So, we could pay for free tuition for more students than are currently on the NSFAS, over a period of five years, by raising only R11bn. The costs would be even lower with private-sector assistance.
Free education is not only possible, it is also affordable.
Rather, the government should be thinking about how education can be made progressively free, drastically easing the burden on students by eliminating tuition fees
Frustratingly, the government refuses to accept this because it uses the extreme definition of "free education", which means funding everything immediately. But just because something is not necessarily feasible tomorrow does not mean that nothing can be achieved urgently; the false dichotomy between a pure loan system and a Swedish utopia is a hindrance to progress.
Rather, the government should be thinking about how education can be made progressively free, drastically easing the burden on students by eliminating tuition fees. This would require immediate bold steps, not endless task teams.
Even if the government does not have the vision to implement free tuition, it could lower fees drastically. If the government intervened to reduce fees from an average of R15,000 to R5,000, this would represent major progress.
Moreover, the cost of free education would be offset by other economic benefits. Funds used by the government to alleviate the burden on poor and middle-class families would find their way back into the economy through relative increases in consumption and savings, and concomitant decreases in private debt.
Free education could save families as much as R45,000 per year if they have several children in higher education at the same time. Similarly, levels of youth indebtedness would fall drastically.
Further savings would come from streamlining the NSFAS. In his budget speech of 2015, Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande noted the NSFAS was faced with "serious corruption". This is in part because of collusion between university finance departments and students.
It is very difficult for the NSFAS to know whether information regarding students’ backgrounds is accurate, and with ever-rising fees, the incentive to cheat always grows, even for relatively well-off students. This problem would subside under my proposed model, since most of those in need of funding would get it.
It would be much easier to spot lying in students who were in the top 10% of income earners, given the schools they are likely to have attended, their residential addresses, and their parental occupations. Not only would students benefit greatly, but NSFAS would become more efficient because its job would become much easier.
One counterargument is that higher education is an inherently elitist enterprise, and that other developmental needs are more pressing. The first response is that multiple priorities can be tackled in the budget. Demonstrating that free tuition is relatively inexpensive also takes the sting out of the "trade-off" argument.
Second, this argument misunderstands the term "elite". It is true that universities benefit a relatively smaller number of people, compared with, for example, the public healthcare system. But universities’ uses are not weighed solely by the absolute number of people they serve. Rather, they are felt through the second and third-order goods that flow from the system — 1,000 more doctors is a small number, but the relative benefits to a healthcare system are tremendous.
There may be more people in the secondary school system, but universities are where all teachers are trained. The same is true for professions such as engineering and law. Further benefits come from scientific knowledge that feeds these fields. And the philosophical and social scientific research that provides policy solutions for social issues is crucial.
To relegate universities to a position of unimportance because they cater to a relatively small group is wrong-headed, more so when we consider the possibility of opening the doors of learning to the poor.
Another objection is that free education will mean lower quality. But there is a difference between free education and unfunded education. Free education in the sense that I use it, really means "free for the end user", and not "unfunded".
This is exactly the problem in our political landscape today: whatever a handful of commentators and the ANC agree on becomes gospel
The question, therefore, is who will fund free education, not whether it will be funded. To universities, if they get the same amount of money, this should make no difference to the quality of the service they provide.
Indeed, such an argument also relies on a link between money and quality. This link has been called into question by academic Robert Samuels, who argues that universities often use additional money to increase their prestige instead of improving students’ educational experience.
In the debate over free education, what is frustrating is not that there are two sides at loggerheads, it is that there is so little real appetite for change. Most people with the ability to make education free write it off without giving the idea a chance.
This is exactly the problem in our political landscape today: whatever a handful of commentators and the ANC agree on becomes gospel, and anyone with an alternate view is imagined to be a hopeless idealist who doesn’t understand the details. But the status quo is, in fact, what is unsustainable. Rising debt levels, poor throughput, chronic unrest, and skyrocketing fees are the hallmarks of a failed policy.
In the case of free education, as in so many others, we need the bravery to imagine a policy that focuses on the poorest and most vulnerable in our society. Free tuition would put thousands of rand into the pockets of poor families, and prevent new graduate professionals from having to live lives of debt and financial exclusion.
This also relates to race: not only does black tax affect new graduates because of the need to support extended families; it is also worsened by policies that imagine we can overcome inequality through debt. The so-called black middle class is really just the "black indebted class", whose freedoms continue to be hampered by an economic worldview that sentences them to decades of privation.
What we must do in SA is have the guts to experiment. The old model has been tried for long enough. There may be kinks in the chain, and problems down the road, but the need for change — real change — has never been more apparent.
We either trust the status quo and lose the long game, or act decisively despite the short-term uncertainty. Instead of fearing the worst, we should imagine the tremendous benefits of expanding access to higher education and living up to the ideals of the Freedom Charter.
• This is an edited extract from Mpofu-Walsh’s book Democracy & Delusion, published by Tafelberg.
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