By Levy Masiteng
South Africa’s universities are facing a daunting challenge: the number of matriculants qualifying for university far outstrips the spaces available.
Higher Education Deputy Director-General Sam Zungu has said public universities can accommodate about 230,000 new students this academic year, leaving well over 100,000 qualified learners without places.
Zungu has urged institutions to combine in-person teaching with online delivery to increase capacity, instead of waiting years for new infrastructure.
The chairman of parliament’s education committee, Tebogo Letsie, has ventilated the same concerns as Zungu.
He said public universities have capacity for about 235,000 first-year students, while more than 245,000 candidates obtained bachelor-level passes in the 2025 National Senior Certificate examinations.
“The number of candidates passing matric is higher than the opportunities available in these types of institutions,” Letsie said, attributing the shortfall to limited government subsidies and funding pressures affecting the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS).
Universities are already feeling the pressure.
As previously published by Inside Education, the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) received more than 326,546 applications for just 9,124 first-year places.
The University of Johannesburg received 450,000 applications and 870,000 study choices for the 2026 academic year, but can accommodate only 11,200 first-year students.
At Stellenbosch University (SU), 106,578 individual undergraduate applicants are competing for an enrolment target of 6,074 places.
The mismatch between demand and capacity is not new, but it has worsened as record numbers of learners achieve bachelor-level passes.
To address the crunch, experts are increasingly calling for expanded hybrid and distance learning.
Higher Education Minister Buti Manamela said the approach proved effective during the COVID-19 lockdown, when students transitioned to online learning platforms.
“The COVID-19 pandemic showed us that online learning is a viable solution,” he said in September 2025 during a media briefing on limited university spaces.
“The reality is that about 850,000 young people will be sitting for exams. If all of them pass, the system can only absorb half.”
Some universities have already started shifting in that direction. The University of the Witwatersrand (WITS) has increased its online and part-time course offerings to accommodate more students.
“We have grown in size by increasing alternative options of online and part-time courses as there are limits on the capacity of the physical infrastructure to grow,” said WITS Registrar, Carol Crosley.
The University of South Africa (Unisa), a long-established open distance and e-learning institution, has for years delivered degrees to hundreds of thousands of students across the continent, demonstrating that remote learning can work at scale.
Zungu acknowledged that significant barriers remain, including unreliable internet access, high data costs and a lack of devices, but said partnerships with telecom providers and subsidised resources could help ensure that tools adopted in an emergency become part of a long-term strategy to expand access.
INSIDE EDUCATION
