The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has calculated that giving every child access to education and the skills needed to participate fully in society can boost GDP by an average 28% in lower-income countries and 16% in high-income countries for the next 80 years.
Which is why one of the most encouraging indicators of South Africa’s post-1994 democratic dividend is the growth in university enrolment between 1995 and 2018 of 88.7%.
Yet you might wonder why what is by any measure a stellar outcome should be featured in a document titled The Education Illusion.
To the extent that this latest report from the Centre for Risk Analysis reveals a high and growing hunger for education among young people, it is not wholly depressing.
But what is depressing is how poorly that hunger is being met by the pitifully low nutritional offering of South Africa’s schooling system.
The authors of the report, CRA researchers Simpe Jonas and Thuthukani Ndebele, write that while the lion’s share of education spending (R266.3 billion, or just over 70%, of the total of R378 billion in 2021) goes to basic education, only half of children enrolled in grade 1 are making it to grade 12 in the minimum time.
‘The cracks are especially evident at high school, where rates of repetition stubbornly linger in the double figure range. Among those who make it to grade 12, just over a third will pass well enough to get admission to study for a bachelor’s degree at university.’
Viewed differently, some 1.1 million children began school in 2008. Of these, just over a million were in grade 10 in 2017, 862 000 were in grade 11 in 2018, and 640 714 reached grade 12 the next year. Of these, 504 303 wrote the matric exam, and 409 906 passed. Only 186 058 achieved a Bachelor’s pass, and just 45 090 passed maths with a mark of 50% or more. (‘Compounding this,’ the authors note, ‘is that the overall number of pupils passing maths with a grade of 70% or higher has fallen by 33.5% since 2008.’)
Labour market
The impact is vivid in the labour market. Among those who did not complete their secondary schooling, the labour absorption rate (which measures the proportion of the working-age population that is employed) was only 32.3% in 2019.
Even among those with matric, only 47.8% had a job. Getting a good enough matric mark – particularly in mathematics – to continue studying is vital to finding work; the labour absorption rate among graduates is 73.8%, significantly higher than for those with only a National Senior Certificate.
How are things playing out at university level?
Jonas and Ndebele point out that, in tertiary education, ‘there appears to be a better story to tell in terms of enrolment and output’.
‘Total enrolment in South Africa’s public universities increased notably by 88.7% between 1995 and 2018, particularly as the higher education participation of black individuals improved sharply.
‘On output, figures show, for instance, that in 1991 there were some 47.8 white engineering graduates for every black graduate. By 2018, that ratio had reversed to 0.4 to 1, largely owing to the sharp increase in black, coloured, Indian/Asian students of engineering.’
In architecture and environmental design, as another example, the ratio changed over the same period from 84.1 to 1 to 0.4 to 1, and in computer and information sciences, from 44.3 to 1 to 0.3 to 1.
Yet, even for those relatively few who overcome the obstacles of deficient schooling and secure a place at university, the absence of an adequate school-level foundation eventually lets many of them down.
Jonas and Ndebele observe that university-level ‘output’ is ‘far from ideal’.
‘Rates of completion – calculated by dividing the number of students obtaining a qualification in a given academic year by the total enrolment for that type of award in that year – are as low as 20% for undergraduate certificates and diplomas and are at a mere 17.3% for undergraduate degrees, 21.9% for master’s degrees, and 13.5% for doctorates. This suggests that many pupils scrape through the lower levels of South Africa’s education system without the adequate foundation to tackle the challenges of higher education.’
‘Found wanting’
According to Jonas and Ndebele, facilities and amenities in public schools – key to the overall quality of the teaching and learning process – ‘are found wanting’.
‘More than a fifth of government expenditure is on education (and, as noted earlier, 70% of all education spending is at school level), yet only a third of schools have a computer facility, merely a quarter have a library, and just a fifth have a laboratory.’
Racial inequalities persist, too.
‘White pupils are almost four times more likely than black pupils to pass maths in matric with a rate of 50% and above. A similar trend can also be seen in physical science results and so on.’
In 2020, 74.5% of black pupils passed matric compared to 97.8% of white candidates, a difference the report ascribes to ‘the poor quality of teaching and poor facilities, mainly in public schools’.
The socio-economic setting of schooling has a marked impact, too.
‘For instance, maths results by quintile (a school poverty ranking index) show that pupils in Quintile 1 schools (the poorest) are six times more likely to fail maths than those in Quintile 5 (the most well-off).’
Where better options exist, however, increasing numbers of parents are abandoning under-performing public schools for independent ones.
Public school enrolment grew by 4.5% between 2008 and 2019 from 11.8 million to 12.4 million. In contrast, enrolment at independent schools grew over the same period by 72.7%, from 366 201 to 632 443.
‘Growth industry’
As Jonas and Ndebele point out, while independent schools ‘have far fewer pupils than public schools, they have seen a faster increase in enrolment. Such schools are a growth industry, owing to the poor quality on offer in many public schools.’
This is good news for those who can afford independent schooling, or have access to it.
However, for the vast majority struggling to make ends meet in a low-growth, high-unemployment economy, the lingering and largely unaddressed failures of post-1994 administrations to meet the pent-up hunger for education among parents and their children is a betrayal of the hopes of millions.
*This article has been edited to correct the reference in the first line to calculated GDP gains from education.
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend
Image by Sabrina Eickhoff from Pixabay