Black South Africans are flocking to universities

[Harold F. Schiffman]

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i30/30a04401.htm
>>From the issue dated March 31, 2006


Falling Through the Cracks
Black South Africans are flocking to universities, but financial and
cultural challenges lead many to drop out

By MEGAN LINDOW

Cape Town

Standing outside the student financial-aid office, Khathutshelo Mudau
glances tentatively through the doorway, takes a deep breath, and walks
inside to try and explain his problem to yet another face behind a
counter. Since arriving here on the University of Cape Town's stately
hillside campus little more than a month ago to study for a degree in
business, he has faced all kinds of travails. First there were the weekly
assignments that his professors posted on the Internet and that he
couldn't figure out how to download. "I had never used a computer before,"
he explains.

Then there was the language barrier, which continues to pose problems.
Previously schooled in his native language, Venda, Mr. Mudau says he
spends hours in the library poring over journals and textbooks, trying to
make sense of his English lecture notes.

His biggest worry, though, is money. Mr. Mudau came to the university
under the impression that he would receive aid, but has since learned that
his application was denied, for reasons that are unclear to him. Now he is
trying to raise about $4,000 for his tuition and housing  a vast sum for a
young man whose mother sold tomatoes by the side of the road to raise
money for his bus ticket to Cape Town. Even so, Mr. Mudau says, he feels
lucky to be here.

Coming from the hot, dusty, and impoverished farmlands of the Limpopo
province, his very presence on the University of Cape Town's genteel and,
until recently, predominantly white campus illustrates the great strides
black students are making in gaining admittance to South Africa's top
universities.

Attempting to reverse the effects of generations of racial discrimination
under apartheid, the country has invested heavily over the past 12 years
to bring higher education within the reach of even the most deeply
impoverished black students who perform well in school. Black-student
enrollments grew by 80 percent between 1993 and 1999 alone, and have
continued to rise sharply. Today black students make up 59 percent of the
public higher-education system. Now the problem is that too many of them
are dropping out.

New Challenges

In a study released last year, the Department of Education found that of
120,000 students who entered the university system in 2000, half dropped
out within four years, while only 22 percent graduated in the same time
period. Faced with obstacles that include poverty, shoddy educations in
cash-strapped government schools, and cultural alienation on historically
white college campuses, black students constitute the majority of
dropouts.

Researchers studying a separate group of students noted that 72 percent of
students who left college without a degree were black.

"The struggle of the 80s was over whether black students were admitted" to
universities at all, says Jonathan Jansen, dean of education at the
University of Pretoria. "Now the struggle is over what happens to black
students when they get into these institutions, whose cultures are
different  and often quite antagonistic  to what they are coming from."

The national government and universities across the country are trying to
fix the problem by increasing financial aid for the neediest students and
creating a range of special programs designed to help them cope
academically and socially. Researchers have begun at least two major
studies looking at the numerous factors that lead students to drop out.
They say that universities need to find better ways of responding to the
greater economic and cultural diversity on campuses.

"This is a big worry," says Ian Scott, director of the
academic-development program at the University of Cape Town's Centre for
Higher Education Development. Last year the government estimated that it
had spent about $720-million in subsidies between 2000 and 2003 on
students who dropped out.

Far more disturbing is the wasted human potential, Mr. Scott says.
Apartheid left the country with a huge pool of unskilled labor  a
situation that now threatens to hobble the economy if not reversed.
Despite a national unemployment rate of about 40 percent, for example,
South Africa has been forced to start recruiting scientists, engineers,
and other professionals from abroad in order to fill empty posts because
not enough local candidates are qualified.

Lingering racial inequalities in the schools further complicate matters.
Many of the former Bantu schools in historically black townships and rural
areas remain decrepit, with overcrowded classrooms and poorly trained
teachers. Mr. Mudau recalls broken chairs in his high-school classrooms.

Back home, most of his peers left school either to help out on small
family plots, growing maize and avocados, or to look for jobs in
surrounding towns. But Mr. Mudau earned the highest score in Limpopo on
his high-school business exit exam, securing a spot for himself at the
country's top university  and a chance to help lift his family out of
poverty.

Squatting on Campus

While historically privileged institutions like the University of Cape
Town now admit white and nonwhite students in roughly equal numbers, the
perennially neglected colleges that served black students in a separate
and deliberately inferior higher-education system under apartheid are
struggling to keep their enrollments up as their brightest would-be
students flock to the previously white universities. These institutions,
concentrated in the township areas and rural "homelands" where most black
people were forced to live under apartheid, cope with the brunt of student
poverty and substandard education.

"I sit in class with people who struggle to put a sentence together in
English," says a fourth-year student at the University of the Western
Cape, who requested to be identified only by her first name, Palesa, in
order to protect her family's privacy. Many students drop out of college
because of financial problems, she adds. "They just disappear."

Half an hour's drive from the University of Cape Town, the University of
the Western Cape's campus of blocky buildings and prefab units occupies a
fenced-in swath of land on the Cape Flats, a rough, desolate area of black
and mixed-race townships outside Cape Town. Established in the 1960s to
serve black and mixed-race students known here as "coloreds," the
university still attracts mainly nonwhite students, many of whom receive
financial aid.

Sitting in a friend's dormitory room, Palesa explains that she was a
dropout herself, from the historically white University of Pretoria, for
reasons "partly racial, partly financial." When her father died, she
returned home to help her mother, who worked as a nurse and was struggling
to support her older brother at the University of Cape Town and another,
younger brother at school. Some days they could not afford food.

But Palesa says she wanted to return to college so badly that the next
year she enrolled at the University of the Western Cape, spending six
months as a squatter in her brother's dormitory room because she could not
afford housing at her own university. "I had to hide because they're so
strict. If they found out, my brother would be expelled from the [dorm],"
she says. "We would mix oats and rice porridge together, and that was the
only meal for the day."

Her situation is hardly unique. Many black students live so precariously
that a single misfortune  an illness in the family or the lack of money
for transportation  can put an end to their education, says Glenda Glover,
who directs the Rural Education Access Program, a Catholic nonprofit
organization that assists impoverished university students.

Staff members at Ms. Glover's organization frequently talk to students at
universities around the country who sleep in bus shelters or squat in
friends' dorm rooms because they do not have housing. Others, called home
to tend sick family members or to work in the fields during harvest time,
do not return.

Although the amount of government money for needy students has increased
recently, it is not enough to cushion the needs of the students her
organization serves. "In some instances, our students are the head of the
household," she says. "Often their parents have disappeared or died of
AIDS."

University officials often have to decide whether to spread available aid
money more thinly among greater numbers of students or limit those whom
they assist. Either way, many of the neediest students are excluded, Ms.
Glover says, because the sums they still have to pay  whether large or
small  are insurmountable.

Each year riots break out on campuses when students who owe money are
prevented from enrolling or continuing their studies. Moeketsi Letseka, a
researcher at an academic think tank, the Human Sciences Research Council
of South Africa, describes a letter he received recently from a
math-and-statistics student begging for help with his debts. "This is a
person in a scarce skills area," he says. "He is black, and he is passing.
Yet this is a student who can't go back to university to register to
complete statistics. There are many cases like that."

Majority Would Benefit

A variety of factors behind the high attrition rate still need to be
examined more thoroughly, Mr. Letseka says. Recently he began work on a
three-year study of the black-student dropout rate, in conjunction with
the Association for Black Empowerment in Higher Education, an independent
advocacy group.

He and Mr. Scott, of the University of Cape Town, are also working on a
separate study of the issue, involving the South African Council on Higher
Education. Part of the problem lies with the universities, which have been
slow to respond to the needs of students coming from poor backgrounds, Mr.
Scott says.

A number of historically white universities, Cape Town included, assign
mentors to first-year students in the dorms and highlight diversity issues
in their orientation programs for new students. They also offer
academic-support programs designed to help nonwhite students acclimate.
The University of Cape Town's engineering department, for instance, runs
Aspect, a "bridging" program for black students whose academic performance
is not up to the regular admissions standards. The program stretches the
standard four-year curriculum into five.

Even though the students in such programs generally enter college less
academically prepared than their nonwhite counterparts in mainstream
academic programs, they perform better and have a far greater chance of
graduating, according to Mr. Scott.

When Howard Pearce, who coordinates Aspect, began lecturing at the
university in 1987, he saw only a handful of black faces in the
classrooms. Now, nearly 20 years later, the numbers of black and white
students are about equal. He has adjusted his teaching style to
accommodate students who arrive with less certainty of English.

"I could talk about something that is a trajectory, and some of them would
not be aware of what that is, so I would stop and explain," he says.

Tall and soft-spoken, with wire-rimmed glasses, Mr. Pearce likes to
organize regular meetings with small groups of his Aspect students, just
to check in and find out how they are doing. At one such meeting, a
handful of students sat around a table, debating the merits of an academic
program like Aspect.

Some feel awkward about being singled out from the engineering mainstream.
But not Nasiphi Dlulane. "If I was thrown into the mainstream program, I
would probably end up dropping it," she says, "and I would have to give up
on being a chemical engineer.

Supporters of such programs say that more of them are needed. Originally
designed in the 1980s along the lines of programs in American universities
to uplift minority students, these programs now serve students who have
become the majority.

"The majority of students in the system actually would benefit from a
different kind of approach," says Mr. Scott. "We have to take a bigger
view of this. To go on fiddling around on the fringes isn't helping us."

Poverty and Pressure

The issues facing black students are cultural as well as academic. Sitting
in his office in the Steve Biko Student Union building at the University
of Cape Town, Siphiwe Hlongwane, the student-body president, complains
about the general lack of support on the campus for needy black students.
His friend, Tebogo Moalusi, also in student government, joins in. Both
young men are smartly dressed and self-assured. Nevertheless, Mr.
Hlongwane recalls feeling painfully out of place when he first arrived on
the campus.

"Students come here, and they don't know where they're going to be
sleeping for the night," he says. "I know the types of difficulties they
go through. I know what it feels like cruising around not knowing where
you'll sleep, and being in classes without food in your stomach."

Asking for help can be particularly daunting on this affluent campus,
where impoverished students often feel pressure to fit in. Sometimes Mr.
Hlongwane digs into his own pockets to help students without food and
travel money. "They always say, Please don't tell anyone," he says.

For students coming from such poverty, the pressure to succeed in college
is immense. "You find some households take their entire income and invest
it in one student," says Mr. Moalusi. "Imagine the feeling of guilt and
the feeling of pressure when you know that someone put their sweat into
earning that 10 rand you're spending."

That is the dilemma Mr. Mudau, the business student from Limpopo, now
faces. He knows that his family sometimes goes hungry midmonth, between
his father's paychecks. Nevertheless, he called his father to beg him to
take out a loan to cover his tuition. "They've made a lot of sacrifices
for me," he says softly. "I have to finish my studies so I can make them
proud."

Meanwhile he walks tentatively across the campus, carrying a backpack with
his name written on it in indelible black ink. All around him, students
sit clustered in small groups on the broad central steps, enjoying the
sunshine. He doesn't stop to greet or make eye contact with anyone. He
avoids talking to most of his classmates, for fear they will make fun of
his thick accent and country appearance, he confides in a barely audible
voice.

Such fears make his campus existence a lonely one. But for now he has
other worries on his mind, such as surviving the year. "It's a very big
achievement to be here," he says. "This means a lot to me."

http://chronicle.com
Section: International
Volume 52, Issue 30, Page A44

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i30/30a04401.htm