Prior to 1994 when South Africa abolished apartheid and became a democracy, enrollment rates by race and ethnicity at the nation’s colleges and universities were woefully askew.
Specifically, in 1993, Africans in the country accounted for just 40 percent of all college students, even though they represented 77 percent of the population. White South Africans, on the other hand, accounted for 48 percent of all college students, even though they comprised just 11 percent of the population.
In contrast, by 2011, Black students represented about 81 percent of South Africa’s postsecondary student population of 938,200 — a number nearly double the 473,000 that it was in 1993, according to figures obtained by Diverse.
But even though overall Black enrollment in South Africa’s colleges and universities is up since the days of apartheid, one leading scholar says the raw numbers mask a series of other disparities that plague the nation’s institutions of higher learning.
Those disparities include high attrition rates for Black students, and underrepresentation in the STEM fields and business and commerce, according to Saleem Badat, vice-chancellor of Rhodes University in Grahamstown and a scholar who has written extensively about issues of access, diversity and success in higher education in South Africa.
Participation rates for Blacks in South Africa have remained stagnant over the past two decades. Badat notes that whereas participation rates for Africans and Coloureds stood at 9 and 13 percent, respectively, in 1993, as recently as 2007, they stood at 12 percent for each group.
