Image: Myolisi [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Number of foreign students dropped by over 4,000 between 2017 and 2018, minister says
Xenophobia and violent protests has caused the number of foreign students enrolling at South African universities to plummet, the country’s higher education minister has said.
Blade Nzimande made the comment on 2 October at the first Universities South Africa National Higher Education Conference in Pretoria.
“Over the last few years we have seen decreasing numbers of foreign students enrolling at our institutions and anecdotal evidence of the migration of some of our most experienced academics out of our institutions and the country,” he said.
From 2017 to 2018 the number of foreign nationals among South Africa’s public university student population fell from 66,409 (6.4 per cent) to 62,326 (5.7 per cent). This is problematic, he said, as universities benefit from global exchanges.
Blaming “increasing levels of intolerance in our society and on our campuses”, he added the situation requires “collective” action.
“We need to recreate and reimagine our universities as safe places for inclusivity, experimentation and critical thinking, as spaces where both students and staff enter into dialogue and debate over ideas and practices,” he said.
He added that employing foreign academics and registering foreign students should not detract from the responsibilities of South African universities have to hire more non-white South Africans.
A task force on recruiting, retaining and progressing black South African academics, established by Nzimande in 2017, has just completed its work.
“The preliminary report has confirmed that whilst some progress is made to transform the academic staff profiles of universities, the demographic patterns of the past still remains untransformed in many aspects, with significant barriers to access still in existence,” he said.
He urged the participants of the conference to engage with the task team’s recommendations, which he expects to receive shortly, “so that the winds of transformation can dawn in your […] universities”.