Daisy Jacobs and Stephen M. Mutula
Challenges of Higher Education in South Africa:
Knowledge Management Amelioration Strategies
by
Daisy Jacobs
Department of Information Science
University of Zululand
Private Bag X1001
Kwadlangezwa 3886
South Africa
E-mail:
and
Stephen Mutula
Department of Library and Information Studies
University of Botswana
Private bag 0022
Gaborone
Botswana
E-mail:
Abstract
The South African higher education sector faces challenges in their core areas of teaching, research and community service. Some of these challenges include internal and external pressures for accountability and transparency in the management of the institutions. There is also a clear demand for quality services, declining state subsidies, stiff competition from global counterparts, low graduate throughput, declining enrolments, inadequately prepared students from high school levels for university education, inadequate facilities (e.g. space, ICTs and equipment), ill-prepared graduates for the job market, disconnect of university from the community, limited partnership between industry and government, low visibility in the global research frontiers, brain drain, low bandwidth, bureaucracy and general poor service delivery. These challenges are partly the result of globalisation, separatist practices of the former apartheid government, rationalisation of higher education sector, and the multiracial nature of the South African society.
Knowledge Management (KM) has successfully been applied in corporate sectors to improve productivity, profitability, customer relations, efficiency, transparency, accountability innovation, and overall quality of service delivery. This paper submits that South African universities have, by and large, not embraced knowledge management practices and argues that KM integration within the universities’ strategic processes and operations can help address the challenges facing them. But for this to happen, universities must, among other things, undergo some paradigm shift that include knowledge audit, infrastructure enhancement, content development, building a culture of sharing and creating awareness through enabling strategic frameworks.
Keywords:South Africa, higher education, knowledge management, corporate
competitiveness, universities, knowledge economy
Introduction
University environment the world over is undergoing tremendous transformation due to a range of external and internal forces such as globalisation and increased competition. Universities now than before compete against each other due to a great number of people who wish to access higher education enabled through information and communication technologies. Universities are also experiencing pressure from decreasing financial support, increasing costs of education, virtualisation and internationalisation of education, pressure to reduce expenditure but at the same time demonstrate accountability and improve quality of service delivery.
As centres of knowledge, universities have long been under public scrutiny because of the special status they enjoy in society and their dependence on public funding. The World Bank (1999) observes thatthere is always a push for higher education to become relevant to the changing needs of society out of various drivers and trends including the transition towards a knowledge-based economy, massification and democratisation of higher education, and the integration and assimilation of information technology into the academic environment. Internationalisation of higher education and proliferation of research collaboration coupled with the growing student mobility and increased competition for funding have, recently occasioned effort to rank universities in terms of their academic quality and productivity at the national, regional and global levels putting more pressures on them. Marion and Martin (2005) citing (Carlin, 1999) observe that higher education executives especially in universities are struggling to deal with exorbitant tuition, numerous existing programmes and heavy teaching loads. Oosterlinck (n.d.) observes that most universities have a structure which is relatively hostile to interdisciplinary developments, yet most of society’s major problems require an interdisciplinary approach.
Oosterlinck (n.d) notes that universities of today unlike those of early days (established around 1200 BC) are expected to meet more complex society expectations. However, Rangwasamy (2000) citing Clark Kerr’s (1968) article on ‘the uses of the university ‘ observes that of the 75 institutions founded before 1520 AD, which are still doing much the same things in much the same places, about 60 are universities. The early universities were not necessarily centres of scientific discovery as they merely collected knowledge, preserved it and passed it on without the need to create or apply such knowledge (The Higher Education Working Group, 2005). The role of a modern university as espoused by the founder Wilhelm von Humboldt, who in 1809 established the BerlinUniversity, includes knowledge creation; knowledge dissemination; and academic service to society. Oosterlinck (n.d) states that the role of the university in society is to guarantee the most efficient contact between university research results and possible applications in economic life. Universities are also expected to communicate more openly and more actively about the many specialisations and specialists within its walls. Universities also promote lifelong learning because what students learn today, will be obsolete tomorrow and in order to prevent this, universities must offer a wide-range of courses and seminars to make sure that graduates can keep up with scientific developments.
Petrides and Nodine (2003) note that there is increased external and internal pressure on universities with regard to information needs of faculty and administrative staff; keeping abreast of changing standards, curricula, pedagogical methods; expanding universe of knowledge; limited budgets for conference and research; demands for accountability and improvement in education. These demands necessitate knowledge management in these organisations. Moreover, though some universities have information systems in place, a number of barriers limit their use. Such barriers include the lack of staff to provide analyses of raw data, variant standard of data collection within departments, lack of leadership due to high staff turnover, lack of integration of technology in the curricula, lack of integration of information management systems in the missions and visions of universities, and distrust about sharing of data among staff due to risk of misrepresentation.
Challenges in South African Higher Education
South Africa consists of 23 public universities (Ministry of Education, 2006) following the completion of the restructuring process which started six years ago and resulted in mergers of some of the original 36 state universities and technikons (now universities of technology). The challenges engendered by this restructuring process included de-racialising education, forging new institutional identities and cultures through development of new institutional missions, social educational roles, and academic programmes mixes. Moreover, the restructuring process obligated the universities to achieve equity, standardise language of instruction, undertake curriculum reform, expand access, etc, (Badat, 2008). The other challenge is that South African formal education is largely modelled on Anglo-Saxon tradition which is proletariat in nature, and the curricula is shaped to a high degree that primary and secondary education were not meant to be preparatory processes to university (The Higher Education Working Group, 2005) instead, the path to a university is perceived as being a progression from primary through secondary to tertiary level. In addition, the Working Higher Education Working Group (2005) points out that a lot of resources have been allocated to education without necessarily getting the desired outcomes. Traditionally, there has long been a misplaced notion within South African higher education that theory comes out of the academic universities and is then converted into applied technology in the technical colleges and university of technologies.
The industrial and knowledge economy now expects all universities to be part of knowledge generation, innovation and production processes but South African higher education is faced with the challenges of meeting more urgent training needs, of the economy especially in technical fields such as architecture, engineering, IT, law, health, accounting, auditing and communications. As the global and national economy evolves, universities will need to become more responsive to meet the demand of the knowledge economy in terms of skills needs as well as technology innovation and transfer. Additionally, the dynamism within the trajectories of knowledge and technology is such that specific skills for specific needs are changing so fast that they increasingly have to be generated on the job. This in turn means that knowledge origination, technology advancement and economic activity need persons with very high levels of generic knowledge. Moreover, necessary generic knowledge in any discipline or multidisciplinary fields is becoming highly specialised. People have to be exposed to the education process for longer period to acquire such levels of specialised knowledge (The Higher Education Working Group, 2005). Kok (2007) citing Asmal (2000) asserts that participation in the knowledge economy requires the ability to renew economic and social systems constantly; to extend knowledge and specialist skills; to engage effectively in knowledge production in higher education; to be socially responsive; to be in close contact with industry; and to produce top quality graduates.
The South African education system is less able to teach specific skills that would produce students who are able to fit immediately into the job market. This is exacerbated by the fact that the workplace environment is increasingly subject to constant change. The real challenge for the education system is to determine the skill sets and disciplines that are being drawn on most heavily by the society and economy at any point in time. The education system would then have to ensure that it imparts the highest possible level of knowledge and basic skills. This requires a very close understanding of the surrounding society and the economy by faculty within the university (The Higher Education Working Group, 2005).
South African universities are faced with the challenges of declining state funding thus, impelling some of them to embark on a range of innovative and entrepreneurial activities as a way of new sources of income for financial sustainability (Badat, 2008). Moreover, universities especially the former technikons (now university of technologies) face a serious shortage of quality research skills. Lamprecht (2008) the chief of Venture Solutions of South Africa points out that South African government while it has increased spending on skills development, innovations from universities have dried up because learning is not put to practical use. This, he explains, is exemplified by incubators or innovation hubs in the country which are hard-pressed such that one can hardly find any start-ups or small businesses that stem from university research. In addition, declining students’ enrolments, low graduation rates, students’ dropouts, student repletion and retention problems (Badat, 2008) are causes of concern. The government and the public service are dissatisfied with the quality of graduates from universities with regard to the nature and appropriateness of their qualifications, training and competitiveness in some fields. This is exacerbated by shortage of high level skills arising out of small intake of students in some programmes or low graduate throughput.
Dr Harold Wesso the Acting CEO of Meraka e-Skills Institute observed that South Africa lacks labour market intelligence gathering mechanism that would assist government to determine skills needs in the market. He pointed out that by 2009, demand for ICT skills will exceed supply by 24% because the output from universities is inadequate to meet market demand and there is currently a shortfall of 37,000 ICT related skills needed in the market. Moreover, a large % of university graduates who enter the labour market are not job ready and often require another two years of retraining to become competent on the job. More shockingly, 80% of students who enter ICT related programmes drop out for various reasons that range from maths-intensive nature of the programmes to lack of hands-on experiences. The Minister of Education, Naledi Pandor (Ministry of Education, 2006) noted that the drop-out and through-put rates in the universities are bad not only because of poor school education but also due to poor teaching at the universities (Ministry of Education, 2006). Besides, the Higher Education Working Group (2005) points out that the links between the primary and secondary levels of education and the content of curricula at these levels and changes in tertiary education need to be carefully assessed and modified due to the concerns around mathematical and scientific skills and the weakening of language diversity. The Southern Africa Regional Universities Association (2008) notes that there is 60% university dropout rate in South Africa. The students affected are mainly from poor families who drop out before completing their studies on account of pregnancy, finding campus life too boring and structured; social and personal problems; having to care for sick relatives, and peer pressure. Moreover, 43% of learners do not complete high school level of education.
Most ICT degree programmes do not have inbuilt provisions for attainment of human-related skills, but instead recommend add-ons from other departments which students sometimes do not take seriously. Information society ICT skills needed include competencies to develop and maintain ICTs, e-literacy, networking expertise, wireless technologies know-how, etc (Wesso, 2008). Jordaan and Biermann (2008) in a study on research skills found that ICT research students on a graduate level in South Africa experience a large array of problems such as writing, searching and presenting original work. In particular, students from first year are exposed to a culture of copying especially within programming fields. They also point out that the status of research at the universities of technology is poor because of the scarcity of research expertise, inexperienced supervisors, and supervisors working in fields that differ from their specialisations. This situation results in low research outputs, and generally discourages students who would wish to continue with their postgraduate studies.
Botha and Simelane (2007) observe that in most South African universities, research is either not published or is not digitised, making it largely inaccessible. Lor (1998) points out that the “filtering out" of articles submitted by authors from less developed countries to journals in the developed world is common. Moreover, authors from least developed countries tend to publish in more prestigious foreign journals which are less accessed by scholars from such developing countries because of high subscription costs. Yet in South Africa, government insists that academic authors should publish their work in high-ranking journals for their affiliate institutions to obtain state subsidies.
Global ranking of universities that has been carried out in the last three years reveals that though South African universities are far ahead of their counterparts in Africa, they are not among the top ranked 100 universities worldwide. The 2006 ranking by Internet Lab, shows that South Africa leads in Africa continent with 22 out of the best 50 universities. However, none of the African universities are among the best 300 in the world. The top institution, the University of Cape Town, was in position 546 globally in 2006, but improved remarkably in 2007 to become among the top 200. The University of Stellenbosch was second in Africa followed by the University of Pretoria and University of Witwatersrand. Others that were favourably ranked were the University of Western Cape, University of South Africa and the University of KwaZulu-Natal (The Standard, 2006).
South Africa has suffered in recent years from brain drain of up to 25% of its graduates to the US alone. Moreover, 9.7% of all international medical personnel in Canada are South Africans (International Monetary Fund, 2006). It is estimated that up to 1.6 million people in skilled, professional and managerial occupations have left the country since 1994 (Ndulu, 2004). The brain drain has been attributed to, among other factors, perceptions of deteriorating quality of life, dissatisfaction with the cost of living, level of taxation, low remuneration, unrealistic workloads, poor infrastructure and sub-optimal conditions of work, high levels of crime, and demand for skilled workers in the UK, US, Canada, and New Zealand (Ndulu, 2004).
The Minister of Education, Naledi Pandor (Ministry of Education, 2006) pointed out that the key challenge facing South African universities is how to ensure that higher education simultaneously develops the skills and innovation necessary for addressing the national development agenda, as well as for participation in the global economy. She observed that creativity is concentrated in a small number of highly talented individuals which need to be nurtured and retained in a country’s national system of innovation. In addition, there is need to provide the conditions in universities in which they are both nurtured and encouraged to remain in order for them to promote the aims of the developmental state. She acknowledged that the South African higher education is not performing well with regard to training new researchers and this was hampering the nation’s ability to enter new and important global areas of innovation. She lamented the shortage of researchers with PhDs in the universities saying only 11 of our 23 higher-education institutions account for 90% of the research output. She pledged to renew research infrastructure especially equipment at the Universities (Ministry of Education, 2006).