CAPE TOWN – Since 2018 the private higher education sector has grown the most — from 10% to 22% of the market, said Prof Stan du Plessis, chief executive officer of Stadio University during a visit of Durbanville Business to the university campus.
“This year we are going to grow sharply in market share, because of the record large number of matriculants. We have exactly the same spaces available in public universities, so we are going to take a much bigger share of the market this year and indeed every year from now on. This is an exciting opportunity for the country, if we do it well.
“It is also an exciting opportunity for those students that we are giving opportunities for. The reason is not just because of the value of education in your life, but it’s also because we have a society in which the return to higher education is uniquely large. The reward you get in the labour market, the impact on your salary for completing higher education, is uniquely large in South Africa. For every year of higher education that you complete, you can expect your average wage to go up by more than 20%. That’s an astonishingly high return on successful higher education,” Du Plessis said to the business people of Durbanville.
Not enough sufficiently qualified graduates
“The fact that the return to school education has gone down but higher education has gone up over the last 10 years tells you that collectively the higher education sector is not delivering enough sufficiently qualified graduates to the labour market — especially not with the right skills. It’s no good to just deliver graduates; we need to deliver graduates with the right skills that you need in your companies,” Du Plessis said.
“Our purpose with Stadio is to build the nation by widening access to quality higher education. We have a society that has a tremendous need for quality higher education. It is currently being underdelivered and it’s being delivered in an inefficient model. The purpose of our existence is to do something about this and if we get it right, it’s going to make a tremendous social impact.
“In our first five years, we graduated 29 990 students. This year we hope to have more than 41 000 students in total. We want to have more than 60 000 by the end of the decade, because we want to provide opportunities to South Africans,” he said.
Quality higher education
“I have emphasised the word quality when I speak about widening access to education, because it isn’t just about getting students into programmes. When we speak about quality, it is all about the output. It is about the success rate of our students. We want to talk about the quality of the programmes from an industry perspective. We want to talk about the job readiness of our students and we want to be directly surveyed from business leaders,” he said.
Part of the Stadio campus are the brand new engineering facilities. “For the time we are going to offer two higher certificates in engineering and from next year we are going to start degree programmes in engineering, so we are continuously expanding and we look at the market. We ask ourselves where are the opportunities? Where do we see a need for training and for offering opportunities? Those are the programmes that we’re gonna develop,” he said.
‘NSFAS badly designed’
On a question about financial aid to students, Du Plessis said “the NSFAS scheme is catastrophically badly designed, unsustainable and the wrong solution for the country”.
“That is as mild as I can be put it. The difficulty is that universities have become progressively so expensive that a large number of South African households cannot easily afford it. University fees have risen 22% faster than average inflation over a 15-year period in which the economy is stagnating. We need a way to maintain access to higher education and studying and we must do so in a way that shares the burden between the state and the student.
“I am not opposed to providing support for those students. I am opposed to the idea that the student has no responsibility at all, which is the current model. Before 2017 students had an obligation to pay back some of the NSFAS grant. After 2017, it’s a pure grant. So the taxpayer — most of whom did not have the opportunity to study — is funding an opportunity for a student who will get an enormous private benefit with no shared responsibility.
“I prefer a system in which we don’t actually say that you’ve got a loan with a capital amount. We just say that you own an obligation to the state, collected by the revenue service. We use the revenue service that we already have and we say you are going to pay 1% or 2% extra income tax for 15 years. If you earn a much higher salary, you are going to pay back more than you received. That is an internal balancing of the system because others will have opportunities that will pay back less,” he said.
Dynamic growing area
The Durbanville-Phisantekraal Development Corridor is one of the most dynamic and rapidly growing areas in the Western Cape. We see new businesses emerging, new industries taking shape, new opportunities unfolding every year. We want to be part of this growth — not as a passive observer, but as an active contributor to the economy, to the development of the economy and to job creation and skills enhancement. Higher education today cannot operate in isolation. The traditional model where universities existed in separate academic bubbles no longer serves our students or our economy. The world our graduates enter is complex, fast-paced, highly competitive.
“Employers are looking not only for qualifications, but for graduates who are adaptable, innovative, work ready and socially responsible. At Stadio we embrace this reality. Our programmes are designed in close alignment with industry needs, professional standards and real workplace expectations. We work continuously to ensure that our students are not only academically capable, but professionally prepared. That is why memberships with organisations such as Durbanville Business are so vital to us. You play a critical role in shaping the business landscape of this region,” he said.
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