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Volume 8 , Number 3, November 2023 

 ISSN : 2579-8383 (Print) ISSN : 2579-8405 (Online) 

 z 

  

Policies in Higher Education:  

The Impact of Global Trends on the Operation of the South African 

Universities 

 

Malesela Jim Masenya 

Department of Development Planning and Management ,University of Limpopo, South African 

malesela.masenya@ul.ac.za 

 

Accepted: 

July 14th 2023 

Reviewed: 

Sept 18th 2023 

Published: 

Nov 30th 2023 

 

Abstract 

The purpose of this paper is to locate and discuss the policies that governs South African universities 
in relation to the global trends and their impacts thereof. The higher education system in South Africa 
is shaped and understood according to many different narratives, the story of higher education 
globally, and the fundamental changes it has undergone, its own particular history and legacy told from 
many perspectives, and the deliberate steering of the system through the application of policy drivers 
to reach particular goals. Intricately intertwined with the society in which it is embedded, the higher 
education sector in South Africa today is as much a creature of its past as it is a creature of sustained 
effort, through policy, legislation and institutional restructuring, to redirect and transform it. In higher 
education, there is an increasing resultant standardisation of the curriculum in response to the market 
forces. Politics in the age of globalisation should not be seen as a practice of noble hopelessness 
because there a rapid expansion of a global higher education market, based on the discourse of global 
competition. The paper argues that that while the South African higher education system has 
experienced considerable growth, this growth has not been met with sufficient funding to enable the 
national goals of higher education to be fully met, and the prospects of a sustainable increase in 
funding are negligible. The higher education system in South Africa is undoubtedly under pressure, 
due to a number of institutions struggling to keep the higher education project alive. The paper 
concludes that, in order to become internationally competitive, national policies in developing 
countries tends to use key projects to drive reform processes, and establish priorities, and is focusing 
investment on a few universities. Institutional managements and staff have to deliver on sometimes 
competing objectives.  
 
Keywords: Higher Education, Policy, Global Trends, South Africa 

 

Introduction  

There is much written about the crisis in higher education’ internationally in research and 

popular media, suggesting that in some way, higher education is standing on a precipice whether to 

disappear into the abyss of irrelevance or to take off soaring to new heights in an ICT revolution is 



 
 
 
 

 

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not necessarily clear 1. What is clear is that universities, as a particular institution of higher education, 

have endured since the middle ages, yet, chameleon-like, they have adapted in form and function to 

changing realities and social forces. As major social institutions, universities both embody their times, 

and produce the people who collectively act as catalysts for social change  2. They are subject to many 

forces social, political and economic, whether international or local to which they are slowly 

responsive, and simultaneously they lead the way to imagining and enacting new futures.  

The higher education system in South Africa is shaped and understood according to many 

different narratives, the story of higher education globally, and the fundamental changes it has 

undergone, its own particular history and legacy told from many perspectives, and the deliberate 

steering of the system through the application of policy drivers to reach particular goals 3. Intricately 

intertwined with the society in which it is embedded, the higher education sector in South Africa today 

is as much a creature of its past as it is a creature of sustained effort, through policy, legislation and 

institutional restructuring, to redirect and transform it 4. Just as important to the narrative of South 

African higher education, however, are the responses of the system and the institutions to forces and 

challenges in the realms of economics, social and political change, and changes in the substantive heart 

of higher education, that is, the knowledge that it preserves, produces, cherishes, disseminates and 

that is fundamental to its very identity. 

 

Global Trends In Higher Education 

Globalisation of Higher Education  

The course of the globalization process widely differ. On the side of the advocates, Friedman, 

for instance, sees the new phase of globalization as the one in which individuals make the difference 

and have immense opportunities to cooperate and compete globally. This phase of globalization 3.0 

emerged after 2000 and builds on but also differs from globalization 1.0 (1492 to 1800), which was 

shaped by countries and governments, and globalization 2.0 (1800 to 2000), which was mainly driven 

by multinational corporations 5. On the side of the disbelievers, Gray6 argues “that the great era of 

globalization is over and that in particular the global free market economy has been a utopian project”. 

Its contradictions as testified by flows of asylum seekers and economic refugees have been too easily 

 
1 Philip G Altbach and Jane Knight, “Higher Education’s Landscape of Internationalization,” in Leadership for World-

Class Universities (Routledge, 2011), 126–145; Philip G Altbach and Jane Knight, “The Internationalization of Higher 
Education: Motivations and Realities,” Journal of studies in international education 11, no. 3–4 (2007): 290–305. 

2 Jenny Coetzee et al., “Predictors of Parent–Adolescent Communication in Post-Apartheid South Africa: A 
Protective Factor in Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health,” Journal of adolescence 37, no. 3 (2014): 313–324. 

3 Andrew L Friedman and Samantha Miles, “Developing Stakeholder Theory,” Journal of management studies 39, no. 
1 (2002): 1–21. 

4 Laura E Rumbley, Philip G Altbach, and Liz Reisberg, “Internationalization within the Higher Education 
Context,” The SAGE Handbook of International Higher Education (SAGE Publications, Inc., 2012), 
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452218397.n1. 

5 Morris Bosin, Governance in the 21st Century, Governance in the 21st Century, 2022; James N Rosenau and Ernst-Otto 
Czempiel, Governance without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1992). 

6 Coetzee et al., “Predictors of Parent–Adolescent Communication in Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Protective 
Factor in Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health.” 



 
 
 
 

 

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overlooked. Global multilateral frameworks and agreements will struggle, and transnational 

institutions that have built the global free market will have to accept a more modest role. Globalisation 

was already a buzzword of the late 20th century, and is even in danger of becoming a cliché 7. 

Nonetheless, it lacks precise definition 8. There have been a variety of different discourses which have 

created a huge academic and popular literature on globalisation and related topics. According to Busch 
9, the “number of articles with globalisation/global in the title have increased almost threefold in the 

past decade”. The controversy about globalisation is connected to a wider debate about modernity 10. 

For some, globalisation can be understood simply as the global diffusion of western modernity, that 

is, westernisation. By contrast, others draw a distinction between westernisation and globalisation 11.  

There are an increasing number of attempts to develop explanations of globalisation which highlight 

the complex intersection between a multiplicity of driving forces, embracing economic, technological, 

cultural and political change 12. Globalization deals with which role will be of nation-states, regional 

and supranational bodies, international and intergovernmental organizations, and multilateral 

frameworks and agreements in particular, issues that will define to a great extent the opportunities and 

challenges for the internationalization of higher education. 

A plethora of recent vociferous studies cast serious doubt on the idea that globalisation 

effectively immobilises national governments in the conduct of economic policy 13. As Milner and 

 
7 Celia Ray Hayhoe, Lauren Leach, and Pamela R Turner, “Discriminating the Number of Credit Cards Held by 

College Students Using Credit and Money Attitudes,” Journal of economic psychology 20, no. 6 (1999): 643–656. 
8 Capital Avenue et al., “College of Education and Human Development,” Harvard Educational Review (2015). 
9 Angus J MacNeil, Doris L Prater, and Steve Busch, “The Effects of School Culture and Climate on Student 

Achievement,” International Journal of Leadership in Education 12, no. 1 (2009): 73–84. 
10 H Fallding, “Social Theory of Modern Societies: Anthony Giddens and His Critics. Edited by David Held and 

John B. Thompson. Cambridge University Press, 1989. 311 Pp. Cloth, $49.00; Paper, $16.95 and The Consequences of 
Modernity. By Anthony Giddens. Stanford University Press, 1990. 186 Pp. $24.95,” Social Forces 70, no. 2 (1991): 529–532, 
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/sf/70.2.529; Thomas S Robertson, “The Process of Innovation and the Diffusion of 
Innovation,” The Journal of Marketing (1967): 14–19; Bosin, Gov. 21st Century. 

11 Fallding, “Social Theory of Modern Societies: Anthony Giddens and His Critics. Edited by David Held and John 
B. Thompson. Cambridge University Press, 1989. 311 Pp. Cloth, $49.00; Paper, $16.95 and The Consequences of 
Modernity. By Anthony Giddens. Stanford University Press, 1990. 186 Pp. $24.95.” 

12 Fallding, “Social Theory of Modern Societies: Anthony Giddens and His Critics. Edited by David Held and John 
B. Thompson. Cambridge University Press, 1989. 311 Pp. Cloth, $49.00; Paper, $16.95 and The Consequences of 
Modernity. By Anthony Giddens. Stanford University Press, 1990. 186 Pp. $24.95”; Rosenau and Czempiel, Governance 
without Government: Order and Change in World Politics; William Ieuan Jenkins, Policy Analysis: A Political and Organisational 
Perspective (London: M. Robertson, 1978); Bosin, Gov. 21st Century. 

13 “THE THEORETICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF FOREIGN POLICY IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS- 
AN ANALYSES,” Journal of critical reviews (2020); Noor Rizawati Nasir and Mustafa Din Subari, “A Review of Social 
Innovation Initiatives in Malaysia,” Journal of Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (2021); Xian Chun Tan et al., “Research 
on the National Climate Governance System toward Carbon Neutrality—A Critical Literature Review,” Fundamental 
Research, 2022; Lukmanul Hakim, “THE POLICY MODEL OF DIGITAL-BASED MICRO-BUSINESS ASSISTANCE 
FOR ECONOMIC RECOVERY DURING THE PANDEMIC,” Indonesia Private Law Review (2021); Mohd Fadzil Abdul 
Rashid et al., “Formulation of a Malaysia Modern Rural Development Framework: Synergising Rural for Change,” Planning 
Malaysia, 2021; Vladimir Lvovich Vasilev et al., “Digitalization Peculiarities of Organizations: A Case Study,” 
Entrepreneurship and Sustainability Issues (2020); Rajendra Shrestha, “Economic Diplomacy for Development Partnership,” 
Journal of Foreign Affairs (2021). 



 
 
 
 

 

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Keohane 14 observe, “the impact of the world economy on countries that are open to its influences 

does not appear to be uniform”. Such studies have delivered significant insights into how the social 

and political impact of globalisation is mediated by domestic institutional structures, state strategies 

and a country’s location in the global pecking order 15. National and global governance can, and must, 

be reinvented with human development and equity as their core. Social policies and national 

governance are even more relevant today to make globalisation work for human development and to 

protect people against its new threats 16. However, rather than globalisation bringing about the end of 

the state, it has encouraged a spectrum of adjustment strategies and, in certain respects, a more activist 

state.  

In higher education, there is an increasing resultant standardisation of the curriculum in 

response to the market forces. Politics in the age of globalisation should not be seen as a practice of 

noble hopelessness because there a rapid expansion of a global higher education market, based on the 

discourse of global competition 17. Although, the discourse of today skills used in employment, 

technically useful knowledge has often been argued to have deleterious effect on higher education 

development, with national planning, industries and the professions extending their influence on 

higher education. In order to become internationally competitive, national policies in developing 

countries tends to use key projects to drive reform processes, and establish priorities, and is focusing 

investment on a few universities.  

Globalisation on higher education is to employ economic standards as benchmarks 18. This 

has led to an international tendency to overemphasise the practical and technical values of higher 

education. Universities achievements have been increasingly simplified to be deemed equivalent to 

applied research outputs. However, in finance general trend towards the reduction of per capita public 

funding to higher education, despite the continuing increase in student enrolments, leading to the 

current fiscal crisis of higher education. The burden of funding higher education is being shifted more 

and more on to the shoulders of the individual 19. Even public universities are increasingly funded by 

non-governmental sources, especially via student tuition and other fees, donations raised from alumni 

and others, and direct payment from business for services provided by the universities. Higher 

education is being asked to be more accountable for how its diminishing portion of public financial 

support is spent 20. The ideology underpinning this transformation has been summarised as the 

assumption that education is a private matter of individual choices and personal benefits gained by 

 
14 Richard N. Cooper, “The Economics of Interdependence,” The International Executive (1968); R. O. Keohane and 

H. D. Milner, “Internationalization and Domestic Politics,” Internationalization and domestic politics (1996). 
15 Alex Burns, “The Worldflash of a Coming Future,” M/C Journal (2003); CATHY L . REESE AND NI R 

KOSSOVSKY, “Intangibles and The New Reality: Risk, Reputation and Value Creation,” Islamic Economic Studies (2013); 
Carmen Boghean, “The Phenomenon of Migration: Opportunities and Challenges,” USV Annals of Economics and Public 
Administration (2016). 

16 UNDP 1999: 9 
17 Avenue et al., “College of Education and Human Development.” 
18 MacNeil, Prater, and Busch, “The Effects of School Culture and Climate on Student Achievement.” 
19 MacNeil, Prater, and Busch, “The Effects of School Culture and Climate on Student Achievement.” 
20 Altbach and Knight, “Higher Education’s Landscape of Internationalization.” 



 
 
 
 

 

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graduates for the employment market 21. On learning and teaching, there is today an international 

tendency to plunge headlong into the surging market for electronic delivery of education without 

sorting out the hype from the reality. The language used today to promote technology, delivered 

instruction convenient, self-paced, individualised and interactive, faster and cheaper, flexible as to time 

and space echoes that of fads and movements throughout the 20th century. 

 

Internationalization of Higher Education 

Inevitable as it may be, globalization is at the same time mostly beyond the control of 

individual higher education institutions (HEIs) and governments. Internationalization of higher 

education is often seen as a possible response to globalization (i.e., as a way to make HEIs more 

effective in response to the globalization of societies, cultures, economies, and labour markets22 as, by 

definition, internationalization is a process more readily steerable by governments than is globalization. 

Although this does not mean that there are no other responses possible to globalization than to 

internationalize, it does imply that an analysis of globalization will be imperative to explore the future 

opportunities and challenges for internationalization. Internalization includes specific policies and 

programmes undertaken by governments, academic systems and institutions, and even individual 

departments or institutions to cope with or exploit globalisation.  

 

Massification of Higher Education 

Massification has been defined as the mass adaptation of a phenomenon by the suppression 

of its distinguishing features 23. Scott 24 used the term massification in the context of higher education 

systems to describe the rapid increase in student enrolment in the latter part of the twentieth century. 

While the use of national enrolment ratios or participation rates may be appropriate to define 

massification of higher education in industrialised countries, this may not necessarily be the case for 

developing countries 25. Thus, most African countries have a very low higher education enrolment 

ratio but they have experienced a very rapid increase in actual numbers of students enrolled in higher 

education. In order to accommodate the large numbers of students wishing to access higher education 

in a country, the higher education institutions in that country also experience huge increases in student 

enrolment. That can be considered as institutional massification, although there is hardly any definition 

of institutional massification in higher education literature. Increase in enrolment are a positive sign 

of democratization of access. Access to higher education is not only open to those with the classic 

 
21 P. Boumelha, “Capitalized Abstraction,” English (1983). 
22 Wendell Schwab, “Establishing an Islamic Niche in Kazakhstan: Musylman Publishing House and Its 

Publications,” Central Asian Survey 30, no. 2 (2011): 227–242, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02634937.2011.565229. 
23 F Ikram, “Perceptions of Public Relations Students in Oman: Examining the Perception of Public Relations 

Students to Their Education in Oman,” Asian journal of management sciences & education 4, no. 2 (2015): 132–145. 
24 Koorosh Gharehbaghi, Christina Scott-Young, and Amrit Sagoo, “Inventive Higher Education: A Blending 

Passage,” Journal of International Business Research and Marketing (2021). 
25 Nasser Momayezi, “Cultural Globalization,” in Handbook of Globalization, Governance, and Public Administration, 

2006. 



 
 
 
 

 

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definition of student 26. Massification is therefore seen in a positive light because it is a proof of the 

democratization of access and is no longer elitist. It also leads to greater human capital formation, 

providing countries with expert human resources needed for development.  

On a global level, massification seems to be important in this knowledge economy where the 

two classical pillars of a successful university have been changed to four and are no longer limited to 

quality teaching and research, but also the ability to innovate and to share knowledge (Scott, 1995). 

Creativity has also become very important due to the mass access and demand for higher education. 

Institutions are becoming more creative and competitive in their bid to attract the best students who 

usually have a wide variety of institutions and programmes to choose from. The challenge of balancing 

the seemingly mutually exclusive demands of greater access and maintaining quality seems much more 

acute due to a lack of resources 27. The massification of higher education that resulted from throwing 

the gates more widely open and the specific challenges, were those of ensuring quality and ensuring 

the judicious use of resources, the size of which have not matched the rate of increase in student 

numbers. 

 

Local Trends Of South African Higher Education  

In the post-apartheid era, higher education faced a problem of trust, especially amongst the 

disenfranchised majority, and a perception that it remained fixed in its apartheid past  (Gray, 2002). 

Consequently, the call for higher education to contribute to the transformation of society became at 

the same time a call for the sector to transform itself. At the same time, the post-apartheid imperatives 

of access, equity and redress stood starkly alongside the imperatives of economic as well as social 

inclusion, and the call for a new growth path to address the challenges of widespread poverty and 

unemployment. 

What is understood as the process of modernisation, and what that means, has evolved in the 

South African context over the twenty-year period in question 28. In the early years of policy 

development in higher education, the emphasis nationally in all spheres was on achieving social justice 

through redress a massive reconstruction and development programme was envisaged to right the 

skewed ways in which all aspects of South African society had developed as a result of social 

engineering according to race on a grand scale 29. The disjuncture between higher education in its 

fragmented form and the needs of a developing society was the main issue that needed to be addressed 

to achieve the goals of the Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP) 30. Growth in the economy 

through a shift from mining to manufacturing, which would require high-level skills development; 

reconstruction through addressing the challenges of poverty such as the provision of housing, 

 
26 Burns, “The Worldflash of a Coming Future.” 
27 Malcolm Tight, “Martin Trow – Twentieth Century Higher Education: Elite to Mass to Universal,” Studies in 

Higher Education 36, no. 5 (2011): 619–620, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.594606. 
28 Venkat Ramaswamy and Kerimcan Ozcan, The Co-Creation Paradigm (Stanford University Press, 2014). 
29 Vera Bitsch, “Qualitative Research : A Grounded Theory Example and Evaluation Criteria,” American Journal of 

Agricultural Economics (2005). 
30 Paul R Trowler, “Introduction: Higher Education Policy, Institutional Change,” in Higher Education Policy and 

Institutional Change: Intentions and Outcomes in Turbulent Environments, 2002. 



 
 
 
 

 

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electricity, sanitation and health services to the poor; and the building of a robust civil society to 

increase participation in the fledgling democracy. 

In this paradigm, skills development was not viewed in a utilitarian way, but as part of a project 

of transformation and enrichment of a society and its people. However, another strand of more hard-

headed economic thinking soon emerged that, faced with the realities of developing an economic 

policy to deal with unemployment, emphasised the need for fiscal restraint and an approach to macro-

economic policy that was more in line with the international trend of neoliberalism and structural 

adjustment to develop the economy on more market-oriented lines .  The shift from RDP to GEAR 

is one of the major context factors influencing the way in which higher education policy was to 

develop, from the early consensus and alignment of higher education with the new ideals of 

reconstruction and development in a relationship with government that was to be characterised by 

mutual trust, to a more complex environment in which higher education has come to be seen as a 

vehicle for the advancement of a knowledge economy, and in which the relationship of higher 

education and government was to undergo some repositioning. 

Given that there are multiple roles for South African higher education, there are at least three 

major themes explored in this chapter, and indeed in the review as a whole. The first concerns South 

African higher education over the last twenty years having had to be fundamentally reimagined and 

reorganised from its fractured, inequitable and isolated apartheid legacy in order to meet the human 

resource needs and the national goals of a modernising economy 31. The first theme underlying this 

review is thus that of the modernising state: it includes the narrative of policy intentionality the policies, 

processes and mechanisms employed to steer a deeply divided sector into a new era characterised by 

integration, a more rational institutional landscape and the achievement of national goals such as 

greater equity of access and success for students from all population groups of South Africa in order 

to further the economic and social development of the country. 

 

Transformation 

The radical alteration of the size and shape of the higher education system and the introduction 

of the policy drivers to steer the system towards particular goals discussed above, were motivated by 

the need to achieve a state of affairs that was qualitatively different from that which preceded it 32. 

Breaking with the inequalities of the apartheid past, a transformed higher education system would play 

a critical role in an emerging, non-racial, progressive democracy, in producing critical, independent 

citizens as well as skilled and socially-committed graduates who would be capable of contributing to 

social and economic development. 

 

 

 

 
31 Avenue et al., “College of Education and Human Development.” 
32 Burton R Clark, “The Modern Integration of Research Activities with Teaching and Learning,” The journal of 

higher education 68, no. 3 (1997): 241–255. 



 
 
 
 

 

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Integration 

Perhaps the most obvious policy consideration in pursuing the goal of transformation in the 

first decade post-apartheid was the need for integration to overcome past fragmentation 33. As 

expressed in White Paper 3 of 1997 as the intention to transform higher education through the 

development of a programme-based higher education system, planned, funded and governed as a 

single coordinated system, the major focus for the future of higher education that is, redress and 

quality, expressed as equity, effectiveness and efficiency looking at planned expansion of the higher 

education system to increase participation which gave rise to the need for external quality assurance 

and qualifications frameworks to achieve greater responsiveness through planning a national plan and 

three-year rolling plans for institutions and goal-directed, performance-related funding to steer the 

system towards transformation. 

 

Funding 

The first decade post-apartheid saw the imperative to integration being driven by the 

development of a new funding framework that included institutional restructuring grants, earmarked 

funding, block grants, research output grants and institutional factor grants 34. The post-apartheid 

reality of a diversity of institutions that had been governed by different funding regimes, from the 

different Bantustans or different national departments that had engineered huge distortions in funding 

allocations, did not, however, display sufficient homogeneity for such a system to be equitable. It was 

conceived of as a goal-oriented mechanism for the distribution of government grants to individual 

institutions in accordance with national planning priorities, the quantum of funds available and the 

approved enrolment plans of individual institutions 35. Essentially, it was a mechanism to steer the 

system towards achieving the modernising goals of the system on a more equitable basis between 

institutions; that is, using one set of rules across all institutions. Some allowance was, however, built 

into the formula to take account of the need for redress funding for those institutions that had been 

disadvantaged in the apartheid era, although the quantum of actual redress funding awarded remains 

an issue of contention; at the same time, it rewarded those activities thought desirable to attain national 

goals, such as research output. 

 

Coping Mechanisms of South African Higher Education to Global Trends  

In discussing the South African higher education system, it is necessary to situate it within 

recent global trends, as well as to elucidate the stories of its own particular trajectory (Albatch et al, 

2010). The first of the major global trends that has an obvious bearing on the South African situation 

is the trend in the late twentieth and early 21st century to provide higher education to many more 

people than was hitherto the case 36. The global inequities are evident; in the belief that an educated 

 
33 Avenue et al., “College of Education and Human Development.” 
34 Bosin, Gov. 21st Century. 
35 Thomas Connolly et al., “Learning 2.0,” in Higher Education Institutions and Learning Management Systems, 2011. 
36 P G ALBATCH, “Impact and Adjustment: Foreign Students in Comparative Perspectives,” Higher Education 21 

(1991): 305–323. 



 
 
 
 

 

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populace leads to both economic success and social goods such as a strong civil society, countries able 

to compete in the global marketplace have invested heavily in the so-called massification of higher 

education while others are struggling to keep pace 37. The skewed consequences of this are clear: 

extensive shifts of academic knowledge and students to the countries of the global north, and new 

areas in the east, with a further widening of the gap between the haves and the have-nots, as well as 

the homogenisation of the knowledge base in favour of certain types of knowledge. The character of 

higher education too, has changed, with far more emphasis on the utilitarian purposes of higher 

education: the development of skills useful for economic advancement, rather than generic broad 

education preparing an elite class for governance; more business and management courses; a greater 

emphasis on science and technology and a consequent perceived loss of esteem for the humanities. 

The trend to massification has spawned changes in organisational structures, the size and 

shape of systems, in curriculum, pedagogy, research and the relationship of institutions with external 

communities. Responding to massification there has been unprecedented growth in the numbers of 

students enrolled in higher education is arguably a major factor in ushering in an era in which external 

regulation and external quality assurance have become widespread phenomena; as the number of 

institutions, institutional types, educational offerings and knowledge areas covered have grown, so too 

has the need for some means of checking and comparing to sift through the complexities and offer 

some level of assurance to students, parents, employers, publics and governments that the expanding 

investment in higher education is resulting in both merit and worth, and that higher education is 

achieving its purpose. 

In response to the increasing globalisation of education, some countries have developed 

national qualifications frameworks as a means of standardising and making explicit the products or 

outcomes of education systems, and of enhancing the marketability and mobility of their graduates. 

Formal national qualifications frameworks, or systems for the national registration of qualifications, 

have thus been developed in a number of other countries 38. A shared characteristic of these 

developments is the need to make the meaning of qualifications more transparent and explicit. The 

expectation is that this will make it easier for higher education stakeholders to identify the nature and 

level of qualifications, to compare them and to identify more easily their articulation possibilities, both 

within and across national boundaries. 

In the South African context, debates about knowledge have also shaped questions relating to 

curriculum in profound ways, with local relevance and global recognition often being seen as the poles 

of a debate about what should be taught. This has deep resonance with ideas of what a university is 

for, and this debate is by no means settled in South African universities. There have been many 

projects focusing on African scholarship, or what it means to be a university in South Africa and what 

knowledge is appropriate for this context, yet there are also strident calls for a transformation of the 

curriculum that berate Eurocentrism, some of which appear to endorse a fairly narrow view of what 

is appropriate in a local context. Others, however, in challenging what has become orthodox, are 

 
37 Bosin, Gov. 21st Century. 
38 ALBATCH, “Impact and Adjustment: Foreign Students in Comparative Perspectives.” 



 
 
 
 

 

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catalytic in re-imagining what possibilities exist for developing curricula that are simultaneously 

relevant to current South African students and which lead to extending the boundaries of current 

knowledge in a way that transcends the local. Deep divisions about values, and also about language, 

still characterise the debate. Simultaneously, discipline boundaries, where disciplines have traditionally 

been the organising precepts of knowledge domains, are becoming more porous, with interdisciplinary 

studies becoming more commonplace. 

It is evident that academic profession under great stress39. The demands on academics and the 

variety of functions required of them have set up new tensions and competing priorities. Pressures to 

perform in terms of measurable research output coexist with larger numbers of more diverse students 

to teach in ways that demand increasingly specialist skills, more complex and transparent assessment 

procedures, more attention to the development of responsive and appropriate curricula, and more 

administration and compliance with reporting and accountability demands 40. As noted above, this is 

sometimes accompanied by less authority in academic decision-making and a more subservient role 

in the leadership and management of institutions. A counter-trend, however, is that of academics 

increasingly being able to pursue their individual research careers on the basis of funding external to 

an institution and effectively commanding their price and moving between institutions eager to move 

up the rankings tables; and of academics in professional fields straddling the divide between institution 

and profession through their consulting activities. 

As economies have become more inter-dependent, and information and communications 

technologies have developed and opened up new possibilities for access to knowledge and sharing 

data and research; as the use of English as a communication tool has become ubiquitous on the 

internet and elsewhere, so has higher education become firmly part of a global context (Jones, 1995). 

Disciplinary communities are now more properly global than national; institutions at the apex of 

national systems find themselves competing in international champions leagues; internationalisation 

involving the movement of large numbers of staff and students to different contexts is one of the 

responses to the globalisation of higher education. Top research universities set out to recruit the most 

promising students and dissemination of research findings and the sharing of data sets is more possible 

than ever before. Yet higher education systems are also called on to organise themselves in the most 

optimal ways to pursue national goals, whether these are motivated by narrow political interests, 

competitive strategies or social justice agendas. The tension between aligning institutional missions 

with national goals and the harnessing of the energies of an increasingly mobile, changing and 

outward-looking academic population that seeks its validation in international communities of 

practice, lends an element of further stress to higher education systems. 

The fiscal environment is changing as a result of new global conditions: the terms of trade 

boom that supported South Africa through the global economic crisis is coming to an end, with new 

 
39 DHET, 2013 
40 Jenkins, Policy Analysis: A Political and Organisational Perspective. 



 
 
 
 

 

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challenges being faced 41. Rising global interest rates are pushing up the cost of servicing government 

debt, weaker commodity prices are contributing to lower tax buoyancy and the depreciation of the 

Rand is increasing cost pressures. Along with rising unemployment, underperforming exports, rising 

inflation and rising public debt, the economic outlook is one of increasing austerity. 

As government is generally concerned with productivity and efficiency in meeting the human 

resource and other economic challenges of their countries, particularly where the largest portion of 

funding still comes from the public purse. Yet as the numbers have grown, the ability of governments 

to utilise taxpayers’ contributions to fully cover the need has been stretched to breaking point, putting 

pressure on student fees, necessitating a much higher reliance on institutions capacities to raise third-

stream income, and increasing private sector investment considerably 42. This has brought with it 

different interests and ideas of purpose in the area of research, for instance, the research agenda is in 

the most affluent societies becoming somewhat determined by the big business interests that fund 

them. It has also led to the unprecedented growth of private higher education provision in many parts 

of South Africa to accommodate the growing demand for higher education. 

 

Policy Framework For South African Higher Education  

Internationalisation of Higher Education in South Africa 

After South Africa’s re-entry into the international community with the advent of democracy 

in 1994, higher education institutions were increasingly approached by universities in other countries 

to engage in different ways with the international higher education community 43. The purpose of the 

Policy Framework is to provide high-level principles and guidelines; to set broad parameters; and to 

provide a national framework for internationalisation of higher education within which higher 

education institutions can develop and align their institutional internationalisation policies and 

strategies. The Policy Framework enjoins higher education institutions and other role players in the 

sector in South Africa to develop their own policies and or strategies for internationalisation in 

alignment with this Policy Framework.  

The goals of the policy amongst others; are to enhance the reputation, quality and relevance 

of higher education in South Africa, and to strengthen its higher education institutions. To better 

equip South African students and staff members of higher education institutions with the knowledge, 

skills and attitudes, including the intercultural skills required to contribute to its socio-economic 

development and well-being. To open up South African higher education both to novice and 

experienced researchers; academics and support staff for personal and professional development and 

to gain knowledge. To enhance international research collaboration in order to contribute to an 

increase in knowledge production, intellectual property and innovation in South Africa; in the SADC 

region; in the rest of the African continent and in the world. Its principle are priority focus, academic 

 
41 Strategic Choice and International Relations, Strategic Choice and International Relations, 2020; Kiren Chaudhry, “Prices, 

Politics, Institutions:Oil Exporters in the International Economy,” Business and Politics (1999). 
42 MacNeil, Prater, and Busch, “The Effects of School Culture and Climate on Student Achievement.” 
43 DHET, 2013 



 
 
 
 

 

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freedom and national interests, legal compliance, ethics, mutuality, complementarity, value creation, 

quality and funding.    

 

Language Policy for Higher Education  

The framework for language in higher education takes into account the requirements of the 

Constitution, the advice received, as well as the objectives and goals of the National Plan for Higher 

Education (2001). In particular, it recognises the need to ensure equity of access and fair chances of 

success for all who seek to realise their potential through higher education (DHET) (Department of 

Higher Education & Training, 2012). The framework also reflects the values and obligations of the 

Constitution, especially the need to promote multilingualism. For the first time, a genuine attempt will 

be made to ensure that all of our official languages are accorded parity of esteem.  

The purpose of the policy is to: guide higher education institutions to evolve relevant 

strategies, policies, implementation plans for strengthening indigenous official languages of South 

Africa as languages of teaching, learning, research, innovation and science; provide for the 

development, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of institutional language policies and ensure 

transformation in higher education through enhancing the status and roles of previously marginalised 

languages to foster intuitional inclusivity and social cohesion . The policy framework for language in 

higher education addresses the following issues: languages of instruction; the future of South African 

languages as fields of academic study and research; the study of foreign languages; and the promotion 

of multilingualism in the institutional policies and practices of institutions of higher education. 

 

Conclusion  

While the South African higher education system has experienced considerable growth, this 

growth has not been met with sufficient funding to enable the national goals of higher education to 

be fully met, and the prospects of a sustainable increase in funding are negligible. As a result of the 

imperative to increase access, student numbers have grown, but the academic staff complement has 

not grown concomitantly. Institutional managements and staff have to deliver on sometimes 

competing objectives. The higher education system in South Africa is undoubtedly under pressure, 

with a number of institutions struggling to keep the higher education project alive. Despite the 

pressure, however, there are pockets of excellence in all parts of the sector.  

In some parts this is evidenced in increasing research output at both institutions with an established 

research culture and those relatively new to it. Some institutions have, with perspicacious and visionary 

leadership and commitment from staff and students, forged respectable academic identities from 

apartheid-engineered roots, or successfully navigated the exigencies of mergers to become more 

responsive and vibrant and attuned to the realities of the needs of a developing South Africa. 

Considerable experience and expertise has been developed among a growing proportion of academic 

staff and education specialists over the last twenty to thirty years in dealing with the teaching and 

learning challenges of a diversifying student body. While there is room for improvement, a greater 

recognition of the importance of the teaching and learning function is developing in reward systems 



 
 
 
 

 

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and promotion criteria for academic staff. There has been a general trend to make curriculum 

information and assessment criteria and demands more transparent to students and to design more 

appropriate and relevant curricula. 

 

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