THE ROLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN SOCIO-ECONOMIC GROWTH. (A keynote address at the Conference of The South African Private Higher Education 06/11/2024)

“Higher Education is not the birthplace of poets or immortal authors, founders of schools, leaders of countries or conquerors of nations. Its purpose is not limited to training professional men, though this falls within its scope. A university education should instead give humanity a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgements, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them and a force in urging them,” and let me add, redefine if not advance humanity’s civilisation.

The unique challenges of higher education in Africa, particularly in South Africa, have compelled me to approach the subject of higher education in the context of this conference with a critical lens. My PhD mentor's question, 'Do you think your mother, who only completed grade 10 in 1958, would understand your work?' reminds me of the need for clarity and accessibility in academic discourse.

From this wisdom, I learned never to assume conceptual consensus on any subject and, by default, to define what I mean with a concept I should address. I am asked to deal with THE ROLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN SOCIOECONOMIC GROWTH.

The dictionary defines higher education as “education beyond high school, expressly provided by colleges, graduate schools, and professional schools”.

In RSA Law, “higher education” means all learning programs leading to qualifications higher than grade 12 or its equivalent in terms of the National Qualifications Framework as contemplated in the South African Qualifications Authority Act, 1995 (Act No. 58 of 1995) and includes tertiary education as contemplated in Schedule 4 of the Constitution; and schedule four (4) unambiguously excludes tertiary education as a functional area of concurrent and provincial competence; it is a strictly national function.

Higher education institutions in South Africa are crucial in offering vocational and research-oriented study programmes. These institutions, whether public or private, are instrumental in equipping students with the practical skills necessary for the evolving job market. It is important to note that the dispensation may have hybrids like the Model C schools, which I believe are present but potentially not explicitly articulated in those terms.

The NQF, which identifies ten levels divided into three bands, makes it easier to delineate which higher education I will refer to.

a.     Levels 1-4 equate to high school grades 9 to 12, including vocational training

b.    Levels 5 to 7 are college diplomas and technical qualifications

c.     Levels 7 to 10 are university degrees

This means Higher Education is from Levels 5 to 10. Consequently, Nancy, my Topic is safely THE ROLE OF (LEVEL 5-10) HIGHER EDUCATION IN SOCIOECONOMIC GROWTH.

Pursuing truth, knowledge, critical thinking, and culture in a developing country and economy like ours is an inarguable necessity. However, more profound issues surrounding our nation determine the context within which socioeconomic growth can be guaranteed.

I must hasten to remind us that many in the higher education sector, either as authors of prescribed textbooks, set works for literature, and by default culture-defining stories, faculty, and management have lived through a past in which the interests of learning were sacrificed, consciously and methodically, to the interests of a tormenting state-sponsored ideology of separating all for an asymmetrical development of some at the expense of others.

The then context did not treat education as a fundamental human and enabling right but as a mechanism of social control and economic template definition, potentially into posterity; hence, it isn’t easy to imagine a future within the set templates.

This project was executed in and by public education institutions. The state and public higher education institutions colluded about which idea of truth they would all be loyal to. This is notwithstanding the sparse availability of scholars and thinkers inside many public higher education institutions who refused to compact with their intellectual and scholarship suicide.

In South Africa, our challenge is competence. We are continuously challenged to work on the skills the economy needs. We must do this through imparting knowledge, as our development age and standing might be in deficit. The choice has always been about how we respond to this challenge in a society that is grossly challenged by the attributes in society and how we match them with our future demands.

Higher education interventions must focus more on the economy's ‘how-to’ demands and less on ‘what-is’. I am a recipient of how-to higher education, and I happen to have been at the most concentrated how-to centre of Black Higher Education in the 1980s. My first qualification was a Secondary Teachers Diploma; we used to call it M+3. Today, it is called NQF 7.

In my three years of training, I was taught how to teach what learners will learn when I complete my diploma. The rest was about the learner and understanding various sporting codes, art forms, and other extra-mural activities of interest.

The system had agricultural colleges and Technikons, which produced civil engineering practitioners, computer science Diplomandi, medical technicians, construction engineering Diplomandi, and many other how-to-do trades.

I later went to university. I realised that unlike colleges and many other non-university NQF level 7 institutions whose existence is through the graces of the skills-industrial-practice complex, the University exists instead through the good graces of the body politic.

As a society, our need for universities is our appetite for the pure service of truth we believe lies within its orbit. This is why universities exist better in societies that do not interfere with their programs and curricula. Universities are expected to be the intellectual conscience of each era according to the progression demands of civilisation. To the extent that university faculty bears unlimited responsibility for the pursuit of truth, it cannot bear the responsibility of current politics.

The university links reality more through knowledge than action. At its zenith, it typifies life away from practical affairs.

To contribute to socioeconomic growth, higher education should understand higher education institutions' roles, character and capabilities. As a society, a nation, and a sovereign state, we are all enjoined by a common desire to,

a.    Heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights.

b. Lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the people's will and every citizen is equally protected by law.

c.   Improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person; and,

d.    Build a united and democratic South Africa able to take its rightful place as a sovereign state in the family of nations

To this end, we identify the following roles of higher education in socio-economic growth: improving productivity, promoting innovation, alleviating poverty, improving the standard of living, and reducing inequalities.

Improving Productivity: Higher education should produce factory-ready alums as far as possible. There must be a short distance between productivity and the last day at a higher education institution.

Promoting Innovation. Innovation in higher education can only be achieved by institutions that foster deep, integrated learning, synthesis, and analysis in a transdisciplinary manner. The learning point of departure for such institutions is to accept the inconvenient truth that today's skills are scaffoldings of tomorrow's unknown skills.

Alleviating Poverty: Improving standard living: Reducing inequalities.

To underscore its relevance, higher education must consider what decisions it will permit (the context of) society to make and then create an auditing process for continuous evaluation. It must establish guidelines to align innovation with societal goals and sovereign national interests in a global context. Higher education institutions, in their various forms, should ask:

a.     How does this curricular or learning path or occurrence add value?

b.    What are the learning tradeoffs with the future?

c. What are the safeguards for society to avoid finding itself future-irrelevant?

d.    How does higher education align or misalign with ethical foundations or values undergirding society?

e.     What role does the state or legitimate authorities play?

The brute truth is that humankind will always follow the arc of what it considers progress. In our case as South Africa, we have learned that the most significant burden of freedom is the absence of oppression to blame when freedom demands accountability.

Like the Chinese, a nation that strives to be better is, by default, already superior to one that claims to be great. In this context, higher education is not only about being a better society but also about being a more significant institutional locus of how great our country can be because of the better persons we churn out after every graduation and in every individual graduate we brand as our alumnus.

One of the scariest thoughts I have ever had as an alumnus of every institution I have attended is how proud each of them is of what I have become simply because I roamed in their environments. That is the ultimate test of education at any level. Those who work in this sector have limited rights to decry the skills deficit, lack of knowledge, and questionable human attributes.

There is always a price to pursue and speak the truth, but living a lie is a higher price. We must always consider higher education institutions as arenas within which intellectual justice is displayed publicly through the various disciplines we call modules, which build up to qualification. I thank you

Dynasties and governments have come and gone, but educators and students have kept the nation's fundamental unity and democratic traditions alive. This is what higher education can’t fail to be. Thank you.