SPECIAL SECTION

 

When fees fall: conceptualizing "free" higher education as a public good

 

 

M. Ndaba

South African Research Chair in Teaching and Learning University of Johannesburg Johannesburg, South Africa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2325-6282

 

 

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ABSTRACT

This article conceptualizes "free" higher education as a public good. It draws on a qualitative study conducted between 2018-2019, exploring academics' understanding of the relationship between higher education and the public good, and the conditions of possibility for higher education to be and contribute to the public good. In so doing, this article argues that funding for free education is a necessary condition for higher education to be a public good that can be accessed by students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. It argues that commodification of higher education undermines the public good character of higher education, and ultimately reproduces inequalities in society, and the injustices of the past, particularly in a country like South Africa characterised by colonial and apartheid histories. It anchors this argument on an analysis of 15 in-depth one-on-one interviews with academics from historically white and historically black universities in South Africa. From this analysis emerged three main findings on the issue of higher education funding. Firstly, the view that funding for higher education is scarce due to austerity, among other things. Secondly, the notion that if higher education is a public good and for the public good, it must be funded by the state. Lastly, the argument that adopting private funding models opens higher education to commodification, elitism, and the risk of being captured and used as an instrument of advancing private goods at the expense of the public good. The implication of these findings is the notion that when fees fall, one obstacle is removed, opening access to higher education - a public good - even for the poorest of the poor.

Keywords: public good, higher education, transformation, funding, commodification

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INTRODUCTION

Higher education and the Public Good

Drawing on higher education literature, in this section, I demonstrate the link between funding for and access to higher education as a public good. I begin with a definition of the notion of the public good and tease out contestations around the public good role of higher education. "Public Good" is a normative concept with an extensive history of contestation that can be linked to the works of ancient Philosophers - Plato and Aristotle (Etzioni 2014; Pusser 2006), which is beyond the scope of this article. Despite the contestations, the dominant understanding in higher education literature can be linked to the definition offered by Paul Samuelson, an American economist, who defined "public good" as referring to any good that is non-rivalrous and non-excludable (Bodansky 2012; Desai 2003; Holcombe 1997; Kaul, Grunberg, and Stern 1999; Marginson 2011; Tilak 2008). In other words, a public good is a good whose utilisation by some does not lessen its availability to others; and it is a good that is not provided exclusively to some people and not others - it must be accessible to all. Building on Samuelson's (1954) work, Tilak (2008) further described the qualities of public goods, arguing that public goods generate numerous externalities that are often referred to as social or public benefits. In his view, for any good to be considered a public good, it must be available to all equally, which provokes the question of equality of access. However, higher education is considered by many local and international scholars to be a public good, even though it is not equally accessible to all. In the following paragraphs, I turn to the literature that links the public good to higher education.

Since the late 1990s and the early 2000s, the notion of "public good" has been at the core of discourses about higher education and its purpose, access, governance, resources, and neoliberal approaches to higher education reform (Marginson 2011; Neubauer 2008; Pusser 2006). These debates have given rise to an extensive body of literature arguing that higher education itself is a public good and contributes to other forms of public good (Allais 2016; Allais et al. 2020; Badat 2009; Deem and Mccowan 2018; East, Stokes, and Walker 2014; Letizia 2015; 2017; Marginson 2011; 2014; 2007; 2012; 2013; Walker 2015; McLean and Walker 2012; Mohamedbhai 2008; Neubauer 2008; Nixon 2011; Singh 2011; 2001; G. Williams 2016; Unterhalter 2017; Unterhalter et al. 2018; 2019; J. Williams 2016). Unterhalter et al. (2019; 2018) categorise arguments in this literature into two - instrumental and intrinsic arguments, which helps us understand the complex link between higher education and the public good.

Instrumental arguments present the view that higher education is instrumental in producing diverse forms of public good including economic growth and development, human development, innovation, lessening inequalities, tolerance, transformation, better-informed citizenry, good preservation and use of the environment, better health outcomes, and the production of new knowledge (Leibowitz 2012; Singh 2001; Unterhalter 2017; Unterhalter et al. 2019; Walker 2015). Intrinsic arguments view higher education itself as a public good and emphasise access, student development and knowledge acquisition, and the "experiences of the physical, intellectual/cultural or affective spaces of higher education that express and enact public good" (Unterhalter et al. 2018, 3). This line of argument also brings out the greater social and political value of higher education, which is evident in both local (Badat 2009; Davids and Waghid 2016; Mtawa and Nkhoma 2020; Smith 2008) and international literature about the experience of higher education fostering conscientisation, citizenship and civic agency among graduates (Brown, Lauder, and Cheung 2020; McCowan 2012). If higher education is itself a public good and is instrumental in the production of other forms of the public good as the instrumental and intrinsic arguments suggest, it must be equally accessible to all. However, in the South African context, and many other regions of the world, this is not the case.

 

ACCESS TO HIGHER EDUCATION

Since the early days of higher education in the 19^th century in South Africa, there has been limited and racially unequal access, which disadvantaged a huge portion of the country's population (Bunting 2006; Fiske and Ladd 2004; Sehoole 2006; Sehoole and Adeyemo 2016). South Africa's universities in the colonial era (before 1948) were primarily intended for white people only, except the South African Native College (now the University of Fort Hare), founded in 1916 to educate black people. For this reason, higher education was not accessible to most black people. Those who had a chance of entering higher education mainly sought access to overseas universities. This segregation and inequality of access laid the foundation for how higher education would be organised in the apartheid¹ era (1948-1994).

When the Nationalist Party-led apartheid government assumed power in 1948, it introduced laws and policies that further augmented white privilege and black people's disenfranchisement. Higher education was not exempted from these laws and policies. To the apartheid government, universities mere "creatures of the state" (Bunting 2006, 42), they were divided according to race and ethnicity, as was the country as a whole. Those that were exclusively for white people were divided into English² medium universities for British descendants and Afrikaans³ medium universities for white Afrikaners (Bunting 2006; Fiske and Ladd 2004). In addition to the South African Native College, the government increased the number of universities according to the Extension of Universities Education Act of 1959 to provide training for black civil servants. Similarly, these universities were divided along ethnic lines^{4 (}Bunting 2006; Fiske and Ladd 2004), and were of poor quality compared to white universities. The legacy of this divided and highly unequal system still haunts the higher education system in South Africa today.

The dawn of democracy in 1994 came with a promise of transformation, which included access to higher education for all, a promise that has not been fully realised to this day despite numerous transformation policies and initiatives. I must acknowledge, however, that higher education in South Africa today is very different from what it was before 1994. Universities are no longer divided according to ethnic and racial lines, which has led to significant changes in the demographic composition of the student population on our campuses, even though participation rates are not yet representative of the country's population (DHET 2021; Webbstock 2016; Unterhalter et al. 2019; Jappie 2020). Most recent statistics indicate that in 2019, 1,283,890 students were enrolled in the country's public and private institutions (DHET 2021). Of this number, 77.3 per cent were Black Africans, 11.8 per cent were Whites, 5.8 per cent were Colourds, and 4 per cent were Indians/Asians (DHET 2021, 10). These enrolment numbers are impressive until we consider them in relation to participation rates.

The participation rate is a percentage of youth aged 18-29 years who are enrolled at institutions of higher learning in South Africa. Data from 2021 shows that the participation rate according to race was 5.3 per cent for Black Africans, 6.2 per cent for Coloureds, 16.2 per cent for Indians/Asians and 24.6 per cent for Whites (Statista 2022). This indicates that while black people are the majority in South Africa only a few of them get access to higher education and that while white people are the minority in the country, many have higher education access. It shows the continuing inequality of access as a legacy of apartheid. While there may be multiple explanations for this inequality, in the following sections, I argue that exorbitant fees are one of the major obstacles to many South Africans, particularly the black and poor majority, accessing higher education. There is a significant body of literature that supports this argument (Moodley and Singh 2015, 108; Langa 2017; Maringira et al. 2022; Mlaba 2021; Gerald Wangenge-Ouma 2012; Walker 2022), and the #FeesMustFall protests that to place between 2015 and 2017, where against high fees and commodification of higher education (Naicker 2016; Griffiths 2019; Dlamini 2019; Langa 2017). Commodification (Neubauer 2008; Gerald Wangenge-Ouma 2012; G. Williams 2016), unaffordability, and the resulting inaccessibility, undermine the public good character of higher education. If higher education is a public good and for the public good as literature claims, then it must be non-excludible.

 

METHODOLOGY

I have, so far, discussed higher education and the public good literature, demonstrating the link between higher education funding and access to higher education as a public good. In the sections that follow, I turn to what emerged from the study in relation to funding as a condition of possibility for higher education as a public good. I adopted a qualitative approach because my focus was on the meaning participants attach to the concept of the public good, what they perceive as academics' role in the public good contribution of higher education, and their perceptions of conditions of possibility for this contribution.

Using a semi-structured interview schedule, I conducted 15 in-depth, one-on-one, face-to-face interviews with academics from different disciplines at a historically black and a historically white university in South Africa. I selected these academics using a mix of purposive and snowball sampling methods. To ensure the accuracy of the data, I audio-recorded the interviews, transcribed them, and used thematic analysis, as described in King and Horrocks (2010), to analyse the transcripts.

In the following section of this article, I present a portion of the findings of this study, which conceptualises the provision of free education as a preservation of the public good character of higher education. However, it must be noted that for the purpose of ensuring confidentiality and anonymity in the study, I assigned pseudonyms to both the participants and the universities they came from. To the historically black university, I assigned the name "Protea University" and to the historically white, I assigned the name "Yellowwood University". Therefore, in the following section of this article, I use the pseudonyms I assigned to participants and their universities as I present the findings.

 

FREE EDUCATION IS A PUBLIC GOOD

The findings I present in this section indicate that funding for free education is a necessary condition for higher education to be a public good that can be accessed by students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Three key arguments emerged from the data in relation to funding as a condition of possibility for higher education as a public good. The first is the argument that funding for higher education is scarce due to austerity, among other things, and this scarcity has limited access to higher education. The second is the argument that if higher education is a public good and for the public good, it must be funded from the public purse. Lastly, the argument that adopting private funding models opens higher education to commodification and the risk of being captured and used as an instrument of advancing private interests, undermines the public good role of higher education and ultimately reproduces inequalities.

The scarcity of funding for higher education

It is apparent that higher education funding remains a topic of ongoing debate in higher education literature, locally (Hodes 2017; Pennington et al. 2017; Gerald Wangenge-Ouma 2012; 2018; G. Wangenge-Ouma, Cloete, and Cloete 2009) and internationally (Marginson 2018; Mitchell, Leachman, and Masterson 2016; Oketch 2016; G. Williams 2016). In the study that underpins the analysis in this article, I found that participants generally acknowledged that universities need funds to fulfil their public good roles while funding is limited and hard to find in South Africa. This view was aptly expressed by three participants from Protea University (Prof Aeron, Prof Hartman, and Mr Martin) and six participants from Yellowwood University (Prof Jones, Prof Smith, Prof Logan, Dr Gibbs, Dr Zoziwa and Ms Randera). The words of Prof Logan aptly captured this view: "Universities just don't have the money", whereas "everything innovative, anything that is tied to knowledge production, needs money". The argument that higher education funding is scarce is a common one in both local and international higher education literature (Marginson 2018; Gerald Wangenge-Ouma 2018).

Participants identified some of the issues that they perceived as contributing factors to the scarcity of higher education funding. One is austerity, which Prof Smith sees as "part of the sort of neoliberal economics". Four participants argued that higher education is "under the shackles of austerity, fiscal austerity" (Dr Gibbs). They argued that government investment in higher education has decreased over the years amid increasing higher education demand (Dr Gibbs and Prof Aeron). For example, Prof Smith argued that "[t]he NRF has cut back on funding to academics". Prof Jones shared a similar view: "NRF rating money is gone. For some academics like myself, that was all we had." This argument about the decrease in state funding echoes what has been said in the literature on higher education in South Africa (GroundUp 2015; Hodes 2017; Naidu and Dell 2020). However, this problem is not unique to South Africa. The literature shows that it is a global issue (Marginson 2011; Mitchell et al. 2016; Mohamedbhai 2008).

While there was a general view among participants from both universities, Prof Hartman and Prof Smith expressed a slightly different view from the argument about the dwindling of state funds for higher education. They argued that there has been a significant upsurge in student numbers since the dawn of democracy in 1994, due to the transformation imperative that pushed for the massification of higher education, but this has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in funds. In the words of Prof Hartman: "Now the numbers have increased, but the funding hasn't increased all that much". This view can be supported by recent statistics on the higher education expenditure of the South African government (Khuluvhe and Netshifhefhe 2021). These different views point to the complex nature of higher education funding challenges in the country.

Though most participants discussed the scarcity of funding as an issue that affects the whole higher education system, Dr Zoziwa suggested that the scarcity of funds is not experienced the same in different disciplines. She argued that it is worse in the humanities and social sciences than in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics disciplines, also known as STEM. She suggested that the allocation of available funding prioritises STEM disciplines: "The funding goes to science and technology, you know, your STEM. But it's hardly ever in the humanities or the social sciences where, I feel, a whole lot is happening." This view suggests that the prioritisation of STEM disciplines limits the accessibility of funding for humanities and social sciences and the degree to which these disciplines contribute to the public good. It affirms the findings of a consensus study by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), which explored the State of Humanities in South Africa, which indications that when it comes to funding, the STEM disciplines are favoured over the humanities (ASSAf 2011, 15).

While acknowledging the necessity of funding, Dr Gibbs and Ms Randera suggested that the sacristy of funding should not be used as an excuse. On the one hand, Dr Gibbs argued that the challenges around funding have been used as an excuse for "opting out of the responsibility" to get things done and that academics seem to "accept this as a norm". He added: "I do not accept as part of what I do that necessarily I have to subscribe to a taken-for-granted assumption that everything I do will be met with, 'Sorry. There isn't sufficient funding for that'." On the other hand, Ms. Randera argued that "the financial question is not the central one". She believes that "[t]here is so much more going on than just the money part of it. And yet we get trapped in the conversation. The money is just a small part of the question of the public good." Her view is that making the funding issue a central one overshadows other important public good issues, such as decolonisation and the transformation of the demographic composition of the professoriate. "We don't just want no fees. We want to talk about the curriculum. We want to know why there's no black professor, full professor, women here", she said. Even though funding is an obvious condition of possibility for higher education's contribution to the public good, the following section turns to participants' perceptions of the implications that the scarcity of funding has on the public good.

Implications of scarcity

The previous paragraphs suggest that participants generally agree that the accessibility of funding enhances Higher education as a public good and promotes higher education for the public good, and its scarcity limits its public good role in society. However, participants believe that scarcity of funding, which they strongly associate with fiscal austerity, has negative consequences for higher education's contribution to the public good, such as resource constraints, inadequate students' allowances, and the adoption of private funding. In their view, these issues affect students' experiences, teaching, learning, and the production of new knowledge, all of which they deemed to be key aspects of their notion of the public good.

According to a Protea University Bioinformatics Lecturer, Mr Martin, the scarcity of funding has academics operating within a "resource-constrained system". In the words of Prof Jones, a Yellowwood University Higher Education Professor, "the staffing, the resources to teach, to tutor and to do research, that part is just shrinking", and she believes that this is "a real obstacle" to the public good. This is because universities have had to cut down on their spending due to the scarcity of funding. According to Prof Logan, an Education Policy Professor at Yellowwood University, this made universities become "far more managerial". According to Ms Randera, an Education Lecturer at Yellowwood University, one of the problems is that "student numbers have gone up, but academic numbers haven't".

According to Prof Smith, a Language Education Professor at Yellowwood University, the problem of resource constraints is evidence of the impact of "neoliberal economics" that is "very much adopted within universities". She also argued that, because of the "huge pressures" that austerity places on academics, it "is making academic work almost very difficult to do". This difficulty ultimately limits academics' contribution to the public good. As Prof. Jones stated, these resource constraints are an "obstacle" and an "impediment" to the advancement of the public good. For some participants, working in a resource-constrained system is "frustrating" (Mr Martin, a Bioinformatics Lecturer at Protea University and Prof Logan, an Education Policy Professor at Yellowwood University) and "irritating" (Dr Gibbs, an Education Lecturer at Yellowwood University). These views suggest that operating in a resource-constrained system limits the level to which academics contribute to the public good.

Participants perceive access and the quality of students' higher education experiences as key to the intrinsic notion of the public good. According to Ms Randera, an Education Lecturer at Yellowwood University, resource constraints amid the massification of higher education lower the quality of students' higher education experiences. She argued that the purpose of massification is to ensure that "more people who didn't have access have access" to higher education. She believes insufficient funding "does not make it a quality experience". For this reason, she argued that for massification to serve the public good - giving students good quality experience, "it has to be well funded". Like other participants in this study, she implied that this funding must come from the public purse and not from fees paid by students. However, as I will show later, this is not an unproblematic view even though it favours the call for free education.

As indicated in earlier sections of this article, massification has increased access for students from disadvantaged backgrounds in South Africa. However, the scarcity of funding has not made this a meaningful access for many of them. Three participants perceive insufficient funding for students from disadvantaged backgrounds as a contributing factor to student poverty and food insecurity on South African university campuses (Prof Mathosa, Dr Getzand, Prof Jones). The literature shows that these issues are common in South Africa's universities (Dominguez-Whitehead 2015; Rudolph et al. 2018; Van den Berg and Raubenheimer 2015). Some academics have had to use their own hard-earned money to help financially needy students meet their basic needs (Prof. Mathosa and Dr. Getz). Dr. Getz highlighted the issue of food insecurity on campus and affirmed that it is common for academics at Protea University to spend their own money to help students meet their basic needs.

These problems were seen as affecting the quality of students' university experience, and teaching and learning, which are key elements of participants' conception of the public good. For instance, Prof Jones, a Professor of Higher Education at Yellowwood University, argued that insufficient funding for students from disadvantaged backgrounds becomes a "financial barrier" to their learning. She argued, "There's obviously financial barriers" because some students come to university with great academic potential. However, "they are sitting in their class, and they are thinking, 'How am I going to make ends meet today? Where's my lunch gonna come from if the NSFAS [National Student Financial Aid Scheme] money has already been spent?'" This example suggests that living allowances provided by NSFAS, which most students from disadvantaged backgrounds depend on, do not adequately meet students' needs. It echoes the findings of McMillan and Barrie's (2012) study about student retention being negatively affected by financial challenges.

Participants also raised concerns about universities adopting private funding models. Mr Martin and Ms Randera suggested that the inadequacy of state funding has increased universities' reliance on student fees and private donor funding, and they believe this comes with its challenges. Firstly, they suggested that donors often dictate the research agenda for the projects they fund. Mr Martin made an example with European and North American funding agencies, arguing that "their focus will tend to be on research topics that are more of interest to them". One example he made was the call for research grant applications, which was out at the time of the interview, in the field of antibiotic-resistant bacteria: "Yes, antibiotic-resistant bacteria is an issue here [in Africa], but it's an even bigger issue in those countries with a history of high antibiotic use ... the international funders will prioritise topics that make more sense for them," he said. In the same line of thought, Ms Randera argued that donors influence the radicalness of the academics' research: "Where the money comes from, whether you get money or not, how much you get. This all influences the radicalness of your project ..." she said. These participants' concerns speak to the role of knowledge production as academics' contribution to the public good, which participants believe should be radical and locally relevant.

Moreover, participants' views about universities' reliance on donor funding suggest that it poses a risk to academic freedom and autonomy, a concern that has been raised in the literature on higher education (Pennington et al., 2017). This was also demonstrated in an example made by Prof Hartman, who argued that "universities take their academic freedom very seriously", but if a funder "dangles a carrot with some money on it, then academics are quite happy to change their research interests as well". This can be problematic because it puts researchers at risk of being used to push donors' agendas, which may be at the expense of the broader public. For example, the research on antibiotic bacteria that Mr. Martin referred to may be regarded as what Alatas (2000) calls intellectual imperialism because it is conducted in communities that will not necessarily benefit from its findings. This also suggests that the source of research funding may determine the public that benefits from research. Participants of this study believe that local communities should benefit from the research conducted locally. However, as Mr Martin stated, it is "difficult" to get funding "that is specifically targeted around the needs of your community here". In this way, the scarcity of funding limits the degree to which higher education benefits local communities.

In this section of the article, I have shown that participants from both universities generally agree that higher education as a public good and for the public good requires funding and that the scarcity of funding is among the major challenges confronting higher education in South Africa, even though a few of them do not see it as the main challenge. This affirms some of the arguments in higher education literature about the dearth of funding being a global phenomenon (Marginson 2011; Mitchell et al. 2016; Mohamedbhai 2008; Naidu and Dell 2020; Pennington et al. 2017). Moreover, it is evident in participants' perceptions that they see funding higher education as primarily the responsibility of the state. Two participants explicitly stated this view. One is Prof Smith, who argued that "the South African Government has not given sufficient priority to higher education institutions". The other is Prof Aeron, who argued that universities are not receiving enough money from the state, which suggests that the state should be investing more in education. The general implication of the position is that if higher education will remain a public good and for the public good, the state must dig deep into the public purse to increase higher education funding. This view is not unproblematic.

Firstly, participants adopt a simplistic view of the funding problem. The issue of state funding for higher education is more complex than how participants present it here. For example, incentive funding from the National Research Fund (NRF) may have decreased as participants suggest (Breetzke and Hedding 2020), but state budget allocation for NSFAS has increased substantially since 1999, and even further increases have taken place since 2015 until it was affected by budget reallocations due to the covid-19 pandemic in 2020 (Dlamini 2019). However, to say NSFAS funding has increased is not to say universities in South Africa are receiving enough money to fulfil their public good role in society.

Secondly, participants imply that depending on state funding, rather than private donors, exempts universities and their academics from the risk of losing their academic freedom and autonomy. This view assumes that the state always has the best interest of the public and that competition for state funding is disinterested. Both these assumptions are unfounded. The literature shows that this is often not the case, particularly in the South African context, where the state in general and agencies such as NSFAS are stained with corruption and other administrative problems (Cloete 2015; Jacobs, Moolman, and De Beer 2019).

Lastly, participants' argument that the state should increase its budget for higher education assumes a bottomless public purse, and it does not consider the fact that other public goods such as health, infrastructure, welfare services, etc., also need to be funded from the same fiscus. Such arguments for increasing state funding for higher education should consider the demands of other public goods on the fiscus (Allais 2018). However, these three problems with participants' views do not nullify the significance they place of funding as a condition of possibility for the public good role of higher education.

 

CONCLUSION

In this article, I have used the literature to show that access, especially for the black majority and the poor in South Africa, was limited by racial discrimination in the colonial and apartheid days. Then I argued that, in the democratic dispensation, unaffordability has become the successor of racial discrimination in excluding many of the black and poor from accessing higher education, which undermines the public good role of higher education. The falling of fees, through the provision of free education, has become somewhat of an antidote to the receding public good character of higher education. However, the findings I presented in the latter part of this article show the complexity of higher education funding, which has implications for our conceptualisation of free education as a public good.

The findings have shown that higher education needs funding to finance its operations as a public good. If this funding comes from fees paid by students and their families, higher education runs the risk of commodification and excluding the poor, which undermines its public good character. If student fees are paid by the state, as is the case in the context of free education, even the poorest of the poor would not be excluded if they meet the entry requirements for higher education. However, this has its own challenges. The public purse is not bottomless, it has numerous competing demands, and it is affected by issues of corruption and mismanagement. Therefore, based on these implications, I conclude that the falling of fees helps us conceptualise "free" education as a public good because it extends access even to the poor. However, sustaining higher education as a public good in practice is a much more complex task because of the difficulties associated with higher education funding. Moreover, it must be acknowledged that higher education is not an absolute public good. Even though the introduction of "free" education widens access, there may be limitations due to the number and capacity of institutions of higher learning and the demand continues to increase. This suggests that funding is only but one of the factors that limit access to higher education as a public good.

 

NOTES

1 . Apartheid was a highly unequal political, economic and social, economic system characterised by segregation and discrimination based on race (Fiske and Ladd 2004).

2 . University of Cape Town, University of the Witwatersrand, University of Natal and Rhodes University (Fiske and Ladd 2004).

3 . University of Stellenbosch, University of the Orange Free State, University of Pretoria, Potchefstroom University for Christian National Higher Education, University of Port Elizabeth, and the Rand Afrikaans University (Bunting 2006; Fiske and Ladd 2004).

4 . University of Zululand for Zulus, the University of the Western Cape for Coloureds, the University of Durban-Westville for Indians, and the University of the North for the Sotho-Twana ethnic groups. The University of Fort Hare was for the Xhosa people (Fiske and Ladd 2004; Weber and Vandeyar 2004).

 

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