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Chapter 5 - Continuing Inequalities in South African Higher Education

The Changing Complexities of Race and Class

from Part I - Encountering Marginalisation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2020

By
Crain Soudien
Edited by
Jacqueline Bhabha ,
Wenona Giles  and
Faraaz Mahomed
Jacqueline Bhabha
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Wenona Giles
Affiliation:
York University, Toronto
Faraaz Mahomed
Affiliation:
FXB Center for Health and Human Rights
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Summary

Using higher education sociologist Martin Trow’s analytic framework, the South African system became a mass system in 2013 when 16.3 per cent of the eligible cohort among people classified African enrolled in higher education. The purpose of this contribution is to critically engage with the important achievement of massification in South African higher education and to understand the changing nature of inequality. The question is whether inequality is still primarily racial, or is it, as the sociologist David Cooper suggests, taking a different form? His argument is that with massification has come what he calls ‘restratification’ of the social character of the South African university. Race remains pertinent as a social determinant in his analysis but class, which was always a factor in the South African social dynamic, has become significantly more important in the post- apartheid period. This chapter argues that this development has not significantly been assimilated into and made part of higher education analyses or commentary on the changing form of the higher education system and how policy should be developed to deal with access.

Keywords

South African higher educationraceracismclassgender
Type
Chapter
Information
A Better Future
The Role of Higher Education for Displaced and Marginalised People
 , pp. 106 - 128
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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