Fellow of "Students at the Margins" writes about affirmative action policies
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I started work on this think-piece with a feeling of disquiet about the title and its metaphors of ‘margins’ and ‘table’. This difficulty with language reminded me of a recent conversation with a potential funder. Their interest was in ‘bridging’ programmes, another metaphor we tend to avoid.
The funder and I clearly shared a common goal to see more students succeed in higher education. Rather than quibbling over words, we had a productive conversation that led us to think more deeply about the ‘bridge’.
Perhaps higher education itself is a ‘bridge’ to opportunity – not just individual opportunity but in fact the means by which stubborn cycles of inequality are broken for families, communities and entire sectors of society, ultimately enabling South Africa to take its place among the rising economies of the developing world.
So this is our challenge: how does higher education in South Africa become a ‘bridge’ of opportunity for all? In this short think-piece I explore the relationship between affirmative action and equality of opportunity, both in access and success.
In stark contrast to apartheid’s legislated unequal resourcing on the basis of race, 1994 ushered in a new democratic dispensation and a new Constitution and Bill of Rights. South Africa’s Constitution is clear in its commitment to redressing the injustices of the past.
Constitutional law expert Pierre Francois De Vos illuminates this rationale: “Equality cannot be achieved by always treating all people in exactly the same manner, because all people in South Africa have not (and do not now) enjoy equal privileges and benefits.” The Constitution is thus unequivocal about ‘the importance of addressing the effects of past racial discrimination through the implementation of affirmative action measures…such measures are not a departure from the right to equality, but a necessary requirement for its achievement’.
Furthermore, the Higher Education Act (1997) notes that all South African institutions are required to develop and comply with ‘appropriate measures for the redress of past inequalities’, but ‘may not unfairly discriminate in any way’. 'Unfairly’ is the operative word as it implies that there can be 'fair discrimination'.
There are thus important differences in, for example, the US and the SA affirmative action policies. Affirmation action in the US addresses a minority phenomenon; it is an amendment to the US Constitution almost 200 years after the original draft. It is an outcome of the civil rights movement. For South Africa affirmative action is a majority phenomenon. It is enshrined, not as a civil right but a human right. It is one of the key pillars of transformation.
So how does the constitutional imperative to ensure equality of opportunity play itself out in higher education?
The story of the transformation of South African higher education is a good and bad news story. The good news is the growth in sheer numbers of enrolments into higher education – a near doubling between 1994 and 2011. In this same period, the numbers of black students grew from 55% to 81% of total headcount numbers.
In this time of rapid growth, affirmative action policies played an important role at historically white universities from the late 1990s, in ensuring that many black students were admitted when their school-leaving results would not have qualified them for admission.
A 'skewed revolution'
Beyond this impressive growth and demographic shift in numbers, the picture is not so good. The overall participation rate is low, and for black students it is unacceptably low (14% for black African students compared to 57% for white students in 2012).
If one looks at enrolment across different types of programmes of study, the picture is worse. Black students are seriously under-represented at MA and doctorate levels and in key areas of study, for example, science and engineering. This has been referred to as a ‘skewed revolution’.
The worst of the bad news is the huge wastage of half of the country’s already small undergraduate intake that does not complete their degree. This is also skewed racially with white students about 1.5 times more likely to complete than black African students. So to return to the early metaphor, while there have been promising signs of increased numbers of students at the foot of the bridge, approximately half of those appear to have fallen off somewhere on their way to graduation.
So where does this leave us? One could argue that affirmative action at least at the point of access has made a negligible difference to the chances of opportunity for the majority of South Africa’s most talented youth. As a recent Council of Higher Education policy proposal argues, what is required is systemic corrective action. A conceptualisation of affirmative action as a corrective for individuals is wholly inadequate for the scale of South Africa’s transformation.
For real corrective action we need to re-design the ‘bridge’ with a particular focus on the curriculum. Unless the majority of South African students are placed onto a different structure of curriculum, we are unlikely to see any substantial systemic changes.
Turning to UCT, by what means do we enable equal opportunity of access and success? From 2016 the University of Cape Town’s admissions policy will shift from race only as the basis for affirmative action to its so-called ‘hybrid’ model: there will be three mechanisms for selecting the incoming first-year class; purely on school-leaving academic performance, academic performance weighted for ‘disadvantage’ as measured by a range of indicators (eg schooling and socio-economic circumstances), and on academic performance and race.
The policy states: ‘UCT’s commitment to non-racialism is not a denial of race or that race matters. It is a commitment to becoming an institution and promoting a society which does not judge someone’s merit on the basis of their race, nor grant access to educational opportunities based on race’.
The policy has been highly controversial, both within UCT and externally. Critics of the policy have argued that it is too soon – race is still the single greatest determinant of opportunity in South Africa and should thus remain the dominant criterion for affirmative action. There is a long road ahead for the policy, but the measure of its success will be whether it enables access to South Africa’s most academically talented students who would otherwise have been denied access due to a range of factors unfairly impacting on their academic competitiveness at entry level.
Opportunity to succeed
Most discussions of affirmative action end there. We should know better in South Africa. Opportunity of access must be followed by opportunity to succeed and this means, among other things, an appropriately structured curriculum which enables epistemic access. Epistemic access means access to the ways of thinking, writing, working and being in the disciplines and professions. In this conceptualisation of curricula, knowledge matters.
Such a curriculum does not leave untroubled the epistemic assumptions about what knowledge and whose knowledge. Nor will it ignore the epistemic (as well as social and cultural) capital which students bring with them. It does assume, however, that to succeed there are particular legitimate knowledge practices which students must acquire. In many cases this will necessitate a re-designed ‘bridge’. The design needs to carefully interrogate the assumptions about entry-level knowledge and skills and the key epistemic transitions through the degree.
Of course, an appropriately structured curriculum is a necessary but not sufficient condition for epistemic access. The complex intersections of disadvantage mean that some students could be crushed under the weight of basic struggles, such as food insecurity or the emotional burdens of loss, humiliation and disorientation. For equal opportunity to succeed, students need all manner of support. This structured curriculum thus needs a heavy scaffold of support – over the whole undergraduate journey.
Suellen Shay is associate professor in the Centre for Higher Education Development at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. This essay was written as part of the Salzburg Global Seminar (SGS) – Students at the Margins and the Institutions that Serve Them – held from 11 to 16 October 2014. #Salzburg MSI. The SGS is sponsored by the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions, Educational Testing Service and The Kresge Foundation.