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Access to quality education and training is considered vital for the country’s future as well as in addressing current imbalances caused by our unjust past.
As a result, billions of rands are spent each year on organisations and institutions set up by the state, often with the help of the private sector, to fund those who cannot afford to pay for their post-school education.
The National Skills Fund (NSF) and the various sector education and training authorities (Setas) have over the years upskilled hundreds of thousands of South Africans, while the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) is said to have helped produce about 6-million graduates.
An entire industry of new property owners is burgeoning on the back of lucrative contracts from the likes of NSFAS and the NFS
However, these successes should not be used to mask the weaknesses crippling our post-school funding model. Millions of rands are lost to the system every year through corruption, maladministration and reliance on unnecessary middlemen.
In this edition we report on hundreds of students whose futures are in jeopardy due to a dispute between the NSF and a service provider. Students at one of the private residences housing University of Johannesburg students took to the streets this week to protest the conditions under which they live.
Yet an entire industry of new property owners is burgeoning on the back of lucrative contracts from the likes of NSFAS and the NFS.
It is time the country undertook a comprehensive review of all these schemes to assess whether they are achieving the goals for which they were established. With unemployment continuing to rise and industry claiming our tertiary institutions are not producing the skills it needs, such a review could help ensure funding is directed to areas where it would have a real impact on the economy.
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