A radically unradical proposition hashed out for the purposes of stimulating debate, and possibly one or two free education initiatives.
“Education cannot be a leveller if there is inequality within education”
This is a guiding principle that underpins my support for the calls for free education in South Africa.
How we get there — by mass top-down reform; or more nuanced, institution and sector specific functional free education programmes — requires further interrogation.
A FeesMustFall process that seeks to achieve free tertiary education as a national reform process is noble, but, in my opinion, is arguably less likely to succeeed than an incremental approach focusing on shorter-term, issue and/or institution specific constraints. Here’s some of my thinking that leads me to this conclusion (influenced by Hausmann’s work on diagnosing and responding to constraints).
In order to reform the education system for free education, we need to simultaneously address a number of constraints to free eduation. Two of these (and there are certainly many more) are:
Availability of finance
Our context is one of competing developmental and service delivery demands on the national fiscus (or just capturing it all together*), combined with low levels economic, income and thus tax growth.
We can either change how we manage the existing budget, or focus on “growing the (fiscal) pie”.
Personal opinions on how we divvy up our existing budget aside, unbuddling existing commitments, transfers, capital grants etc in order to re-allocate more money to education is a difficult constraint to address, involving multiple institutional and political dynamics — not to mention the more technical legal and financial processes. Do we have the competencies to manage this process successfully?
Even if we did see bold leadership from the top to re-allocate funds to education, this sort of reform would no doubt have unpredictable, but adverse interactions elsewhere in the system. Do we have the competencies to manage those impacts?
Addressing any of the constraints around economic growth and tax collection to grow the available budget is the other work-around. This is a slow and indirect process. Not to mention hard to achieve — cue missive about the failure to implement the NDP, and the variety of constraints behind that failure.
From this perspective, I’d argue that reforms requiring top-down fiscal reform towards free education are unrealistic currently. Perhaps there are funds in the private sector that can be tapped into, but here we encounter the second constraint, that of low appropriability of education.
Low appropriability
That is, (perceived or real) low socio-economic returns on education investment .
Many qualified people are un- or under-employed, leave the country with their subsidised qualifications, or drop out of the job market all together. At the same time, many sectors hunger for skills pipelines that don’t exist — gone are the days of apprenticeships and technical skills — the sorts of jobs that are productive and offer greater multipliers than many service sector jobs.
Where we do have a good match of skills supplied and skills demanded, we see high salaries — arguably good for the tax base, but insufficient in scale to trigger structural transformation of the economy, and possibly too centred in services that do not complexify and diversify our outputs as a country in jobs-intensive ways (what we really need for remarkable social returns).
I’d put this down to a market-academia coordination failure, worsened by global education-market factors that influence prioritisation and strategies of our universities.
Working with the possible, as idealists
Reforms that aim to simultaneously achieve across-the-board unblocking of multiple constraints often to not work. This is not unique to South Africa, and is part of the impetus behind more and more “massive-small”, “iterative adaptation” models of doing development work globally. This way of working seeks to pool know-how, interests and legitimacy to find functional responses to complex problems**, while building state capabilities to create public value.
As much as I’d like to believe that “government” should be able to pull off required reforms, there’s something to be said about working with government institutions as they really are, not as we wish they were.
What we often see in social movements is a pushing up against an imagined, ideal-form institution, and then being surprised (dumbfounded?) when those institutions are unable to respond to our protests in the ideal way (when fees don’t fall, dialogue doesn’t happen, deadlines are missed etc). Frustrating as this is, it can, however, be advantageous to a movement to the extent that the institutions have now revealed more about their imperfect and often contradictory selves to us, the public.
Perhaps we’d be better off using what we learn about these institutions in how they fail to respond ideally, to inform a strategy that focuses on the possible.
With this “system intelligence”, let’s look to where can we develop pockets of free education, aimed at supplying skills into sectors that demand them, in partnership with national education funds, the infrastructure of knowledge institutions, and the private sector “offtakers” of skilled people?
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*I mean, talk about the elephant in the room.
**Watch this space for more writing on “social change as a daily practice”, where I will unpack this in more detail.
