The wrong ideology of "free higher education

In Saturday, October 17, 2015 Second National Summit on Higher Education organized by the Ministry of Higher Education and Training of South Africa along with a wide range of stakeholders issued a statement Durban on transformation in higher education. After listing significant gains transformation solved statement that seven issues should be resolved immediately.
The first three related to unspecified in terms of funding "initiatives" and student debt, the fee structure was also a national student financial aid or NSFAS that need to be strengthened. The statement concluded by calling for the role players to report annually on progress with each of the seven immediately and nine medium resolutions.
On Tuesday, October 20, Eyewitness News, entitled "SA varsities brought to a standstill", has announced that students have reported back.

In Wednesday, October 21, title of the Times Live shouted "Students storm parliament," followed by ". For the first time in history, grenades were fired in the parliamentary constituency when hundreds of students protesting against increased student fees entered the gates"
On Friday, October 23 Times Live reported that President Jacob Zima, after meeting with student leaders and university officials said at a press conference at the premises of the Union in Pretoria: "We agreed that there will be an increase of 0% of university fees in 2016 on. "
This is the largest and most effective student campaign in post-1994 South Africa.
The strategy of non-party-aligned, non-formal leadership mobilization through social media is remarkably similar to the way Manuel Cast ells, the networks of Outrage and Hope: social movements in the era of the Internet, describes the new forms of social movements - from the "Arab Spring" movement Insignias in Spain and the Occupy movement on Wall Street in the United States.
One imagines that some student leaders must have been reading Cast ells, and he will be very impressed by them.
Unfortunately, it does not appear that students were reading Thomas Piety 2014 book on inequality and wealth, Capital in the twenty-first century.
Free privileges for the rich higher education
Media and student speakers fiche and The slide effortlessly between "free higher education for the poor" and "free higher education for all." These are two very different concepts.
When journalists and talk show hosts to contact me for an opinion, they invariably ask, "Is free higher education is a good idea, and where the money will come from?" The short answer is: "No, there is not enough money in any developing country, free higher education."
They usually cite the examples are Norway, Finland and Germany - the richest and most developed countries in Europe - but never Africa or Latin America.
To my knowledge, since independence, all African countries had national leading public universities that offer free higher education. In his book Scholars in the Market Place 2008: Dilemmas of neoliberal reform in Maker ere University, Mahmud Madman describes it eloquently:
"The goal is to train ... a small elite of full scholarships, which include tuition, board, health insurance, transportation and even" welcome "to cover personal needs ... in terms of what the student had an exceptional opportunity ; in terms of society, an extraordinary privilege. "
This generosity towards elite had two consequences.
First, when Maker ere University can not afford to pay their staff, to introduce a two-tier system: free public higher education during the day and paid private students in the evening. By 2008, Madman described this "commercialization" of Maker ere as a devaluation of higher education in the form of low-level training without research.
The second consequence was the mushrooming of low quality private "universities" that charge excessive fees for qualifying low currency nationally and internationally has no value.
Who has access to full scholarships leading universities? Children of the business and political elite who had gone to the top schools in the country and abroad. Several extremely talented poor students also gained free entry into higher education. The rest coming from poor schools, eventually (if they are lucky) in low quality paid academic institutions.
From the perspective of a technical economist Sean Archer of the University of Cape Town says that free higher education is regressive: the poorer members of society subsidize the rich.
This is the story of free higher education in Africa and Latin America - and Piety classic example of how government strategies, sometimes unintentionally, but more often deliberately privilege of the elite.
What is cynical in South Africa is that we are privileged elite under the banner of a pro-poor policy.
In 2004, the article "Higher education funding" of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Nicholas Barr pointed out that even in OECD countries, public universities consistently argued that low or no tuition fees provide greater equality of educational opportunities by providing greater access.
But, says Barr, such reasoning is incorrect, since most state universities subsidy accrues to students from families with medium and high incomes.