By Marcus Moloko
Minister of Higher Education and Training, Buti Manamela, has outlined a solid plan to secure the future of the country’s universities, acknowledging both the achievements and the challenges of the current funding model.
Speaking at the 11th Annual Conference of the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) at Kellogg College, University of Oxford, on 23 April 2026, Manamela described what he called a “paradox” in South Africa’s higher education system.
“The South African state has never spent more on higher education, and the South African university has rarely felt more fragile,” he said to delegates.
He explained that while the government paid tuition fees for approximately 62 percent of undergraduate students, universities themselves had grown poorer in real terms.
The block grant that sustained academic salaries and research had grown below inflation, infrastructure budgets were cut, and student debt ballooned to R23 billion, much of it unrecoverable.
The Minister traced this paradox back to the #FeesMustFall movement of 2015 – 2016, which led to the introduction of fully subsidised higher education for students from low-income households in 2017.
While he praised the policy’s impact, he noted that NSFAS‑funded students completed their degrees at rates about ten percentage points higher than the general cohort.
ALSO READ: Deputy Minister Gungubele strengthens digital partnerships
“Young people from working‑class and rural households who, a decade ago, would simply not have been at university, are now there, and are succeeding,” Manamela said.
He acknowledged that the grant‑based model had, however, squeezed other parts of the higher education budget, diverting funds away from infrastructure and research.
To address this, Manamela announced the department had prepared a four‑tier student funding framework for Cabinet approval, with implementation targeted for 2027.
This framework included:
- Full grants for the poorest students.
- Income‑contingent loans for the “missing middle.”
- Bursaries for scarce and critical skills and
- A reformed tier of private contributions.
Manamela emphasised that lessons from international research, particularly on the risks of poorly designed loan schemes, would shape the policy.
He also committed to a complete overhaul of NSFAS, citing late payments and fraud in accommodation funding.
“We are not tweaking that system. We are rebuilding the student financial aid administrative architecture for the long term,” he said.
On tuition fees, he called for a formal regulatory framework to replace the current annual compact with vice‑chancellors. This, he argued, would help narrow inequalities between historically advantaged and disadvantaged institutions.
ALSO READ: Maile to conduct oversight visit at Bovet Primary School
Beyond financing, Manamela indicated the need to rebuild public trust in universities. He warned that graduate unemployment and perceptions of elitism threaten the political coalition sustaining public funding.
He also highlighted plans to expand access through differentiation and articulation, integrating agricultural colleges, strengthening TVET pathways, and creating dignified alternatives to traditional universities.
“A gross enrolment ratio of approximately twenty‑five percent is too low for a country with our demographic pressure and our skills deficit. We will not get to forty percent by building more universities of the 1960s kind,” he said.
The minister urged the international audience to see South Africa not only as a cautionary tale but also as a country committed to treating higher education as a public good.
“Poverty cannot be a fee a student pays to remain poor,” he said.
“I would rather govern a higher education system that is trying, imperfectly and sometimes clumsily, to make education a public good, than govern one that has given up on the attempt.”
