Wasting study space

PRINT, broadcast or online, the media is currently full of education-related issues, among them the tragic tales of varsities swamped by students desperate to enrol for first year.

I only have some fairly indirect recent experience of two universities, but I do find myself wondering, on that spindly and shaky basis, about whether our universities have had the administrative sense beaten out of them by this annual onslaught.

For three years now, I’ve had to tell an overseas sponsor how much the fees at the University of Johannesburg will be; for three years I’ve had to guess, since the uni is unable to tell me. Last year, the young person concerned had to spend months sorting out a clash of subjects – she ended up enrolled in two subjects whose lecture times clashed – and I only found out the final figure for fees in June.

The other uni is Pretoria; here, a youngster who’d been accepted for first year told me he had to wait until days before registration to find out if he would be awarded a place in a university residence.

Apparently it’s decided on academic merit, so the uni has to wait until Matric marks are out, and then work through the list and the students who’ve double-booked at two universities at once, and only then can they decide. Which means that the students may well end up with only a couple of tense days in which to nail some accommodation in the area.

This all seems rather ham-handed to me. (I’d be very happy, by the way, to hear from someone who can explain these policies to me and/or tell me I’ve got them wrong.)

But the thing that plagues me most is the very broad brush-strokes used to select appropriate students for first year. I’ve seen two first-year intakes, thanks to the young woman for whom I found overseas sponsorship.

She was the top girl student in her township school; I paid a science teacher and a maths teacher to give her a couple of hours fine-tuning close to the exams, and both of them told me that given the poor or absent teaching she’d had, she had done miracles to learn it all on her own.

I thought getting funding for her would be a cinch – I mean, informal settlement kid (tick), female (tick), Aids orphan (tick), black (tick), and mad to do science (tick, tick, tick). But no – it was only through a fairy tale accident of fate that I met an ex-Saffer whose academic career had been spent at Oxford and who wanted to help previously disadvantaged kids do science, and he offered finance.

But she didn’t get straight As, so she could not get into Bachelor of Science first year. She did a biotech diploma first-year instead. With this proof behind her that she was a good student, she got into first-year BSc the following year.

I’m proud to say that she’s about to register for third-year BSc, with hopes to continue and become a researcher. That’s because she is a driven young woman who thrives on studying, who is able and willing to put aside things like upheavals on the boyfriend front and arguments with half-sisters to concentrate on her books.

But that makes her unusual. I listened to her, at the end of both of her first-year experiences, talk about the students who had done so well in Matric that they’d scored bursaries, or those whose parents had scraped together the cost of a university course, and yet they had failed, dropped out, or done so badly that just skating into second year was a poor omen for their future academic career.

So a significant percentage of the first-year places were wasted. With kids hammering at the university gates, that seems like a very sad picture to me. I wonder if it isn’t possible to put in place filters which would exclude some of those who will inevitably drop out, and allow some youngsters, like my friend, with less than perfect Matric marks but the right attitude, to squeeze in instead.

In some subjects, such as architecture, many unis require more of you than just your Matric certificate – you have to supply a portfolio that shows your artistic talent. Would there not be a sensible way of testing a student’s aptitude for other subjects too?

Then, overseas, students often are required to write a letter, motivating for their acceptance on the basis of what they’ve achieved already, their personalities and strengths and character witnesses. This also gives the university a chance to assess how articulate the would-be student is. Is this required at any of our universities?

Finally, surely there must be some way to take into account the different worlds from which students come? If you had a geography teacher who was absent for all but a handful of days in your Grade 11 year and a Grade 12 maths teacher who avoided teaching certain sections which he didn’t understand, your Bs in these subjects are assuredly worth far more than the As achieved by a kid from a posh boys’ school whose parents can afford extra tuition.

For the sake of a flourishing economy, it makes sense to identify as early as possible those who show real promise of succeeding in a more academic education, instead of wasting valuable funding and space on kids whose brains and energy might be better focused on other fields.

 - FIn24

*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own.