DC Accepted Papers Paper:
The Elusiveness of Equity and Diversity in South Africa’s National Plan for Higher Education Policy Era: Evidence of an Unchanging Graduate Demographic Profile
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Described as a lever for advancing equity and redress, the National Plan for Higher Education (NPHE) was implemented in 2003 as part of a collection of policies that sought to engender transformation in post-apartheid South Africa. While there has been several a priori projections on the possible effects of the policy, posteriori empirical evaluations of the impact of this policy remain scant, merely observational, and unrepresentative. Given the strong demands for transformation expressed in recent nationwide protests, it is clear that the country urgently needs credible evaluations of NPHE’s impact. I address this requisite by implementing a multilevel comparative interrupted time series quasi-experimental design on nationally representative household survey data from 1994 through 2019 to evaluate the effects of NPHE on equity and redress. In particular, I compare changes in the predicted probabilities of enumerating non-White graduates – the targeted beneficiaries of the NPHE – with estimated variants for White graduates across time. The results indicate that while the implementation of NPHE facilitated a nominal increase in the number of enumerated non-White bachelor’s graduates, the policy had no effect in increasing the proportional share of non-White bachelor’s graduates, especially for females as it espoused. The evidence also shows that NPHE was unsuccessful in achieving the goal of increasing the number of Non-White master’s or doctorate graduates even in nominal terms. These results suggest that equity and diversity in the country’s higher education landscape largely remains elusive despite the existence of NPHE as a policy lever to engender transformation.
