CONCLUSION

The discussion on funding in Chapter 4 emphasised that for the past 20 years close links have existed between the government funding received by universities and technikons and their student enrolments. This funding framework was initially one which had been designed specifically for the historically white universities, and which was eventually extended to all 36 public universities and technikons. By the end of 2000 the historically black universities and many of the technikons were experiencing severe financial strains. The major problems they faced were firstly, that the SAPSE funding framework, with all its apartheid assumptions, had remained in place throughout the 1990s; secondly, even by the beginning of 2001, the revised framework spelled out in the 1997 White Paper was not yet implemented. Chapter 4 also showed that the delay in the implementation of a new post-SAPSE framework has permitted some historically white institutions to adopt strategies which generated considerable financial benefits for them. In this context other institutions also adopted a range of strategies, evidence of which can be seen in their changing student enrolment patterns.

Chapter 5 shows that student enrolment patterns changed dramatically, and shows further that these changing patterns of enrolment can be attributed to a number of factors. First, South Africa’s new political dispensation provided black students with many more choices in terms of where to study. Secondly, vocational qualifications lost their stigma and many students started seeing them as being more valuable as a basis for employment than university degrees. Third is the question of cost: technikons offered study programmes at a fraction of the cost of university programmes. Even where universities were able to offer students financial support, the resource base of the different institutions meant that more financial aid was available in some universities than in others. For example, the historically white English-medium universities were able to provide students with financial aid to cover both residential costs and fees. The historically black universities, on the other hand, spread student financial aid across the entire student body in an effort to provide support to many more students, with the result that each student got fewer rands to cover the costs of their studies at these institutions A conclusion which can be drawn from Chapter 5 is that by 2000 three different clusters of institutions had emerged in South Africa’s public higher education system: high-growth institutions, medium-growth institutions, and low-growth institutions. Student enrolments grew fastest in all technikons and the historically white Afrikaans-medium universities. Only the historically white Afrikaans-medium universities, however, seem to have employed clear adaptive strategies to achieve high rates of growth (opening up their