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Background to the study The 1990s saw a boom of private institutions that provide post-matric education and as a result attracted Government attention. The Department of Education (DoE) recognise their presence and brought out legislation to regulate their operations. As a result, some of these private institutions are now registered with DoE as higher education institutions. Private institutions also started forming relationships with the universities and technikons (public higher education institutions). This prompted DoE to formulate another policy in an effort to curtail these operations. Despite the policy, these lucrative relationships continue to exist, mainly because they provide business for both public and private providers and many students require their services. This study is a report on the nature of these relationships, or public-private partnerships. Findings Government policy should provide for universities and technikons to form relationships with private institutions in higher education (HE), but these affiliations should be subjected to similar conditions as public institutions, namely to provide quality education and give access to the broader community. Such are the findings of a new Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) report, The Business of Higher Education, which analyses the reasons why and how technikons and universities formed partnerships with private providers for the provision of HE in South Africa. It also studied the roles and responsibilities of partner institutions, and the impact of these partnerships on HE , as they existed between 2002 and 2003. These types of relationships between public and private institutions should not be left to develop according to their own devices, but methods of provision, the types of institutions and the programmes they offer, should also be scrutinised, says Mahlubi (Chief) Mabizela, the principal investigator. It was found that universities had more students studying at these private institutions than the technikons. And the University of Pretoria and the Pretoria Technikon (now the Technical University of Tshwane) had more students enrolled at private institutions than others of their kind. Student enrolments in these public-private partnerships comprised about 8% (or about 56 000 students) of overall HE enrolments in 2002. Mabizela says a few partner private providers had programmes that were accredited by the Higher Education Qualifications Committee (HEQC) and registered with the Department of Education (DoE) as private higher education institutions. But most partner private providers had no accredited programmes and were not registered with the DoE. Despite tight regulations on these partnerships introduced by the DoE through the National Plan for Higher Education in 2001, these types of partnerships still exist. "The existence of these partnerships is largely due to existing demand from students who are unable to study full-time and, therefore, not taught face-to-face. These are mainly school teachers, who are forced to study through distance education because they cannot leave their employment, and working adults and school leavers who prefer to study through distance education but then require face-to-face contact teaching", says Mabizela.
Private providers close these gaps by serving as mediators between public institutions and their students. These partnerships can be described as follows: The majority of private providers operate as service providers or conduits between face-to-face public (residential) institutions and their distance education students, for example the partnership that existed between the University of Pretoria and Lyceum College. Some former Afrikaans universities increased their black students' intake through this type of partnership, thereby claiming to be meeting imperatives of transformation. Of the 56 000 students studying through partnerships at the time of study, about 86% (about 48 000 students) was enrolled through this type of partnership. This type of partnerships was largely affected by the DoE's regulations, and many have since been terminated. Some partner private providers offer face-to-face contact in the form or lectures and tutorials to students who are registered with distance education public institutions, as is the case between Boston City Campus and Unisa. The DoE's regulations on partnerships do not cover this type of partnerships and the quality of teaching and learning is unregulated. This type of partnership covered about 14% (about 7000 students) of the overall partnership enrolments. A few partnerships exist where private institutions seriously engage in their specialised fields of study, or operation, by tapping into the expertise and experience of public HE institutions. In such partnerships, public partner institutions also serve to legitimise and elevate the standard of learning programmes and qualifications of the partner private institutions. Some of these partnerships are meant to raise the level of academic expertise of private partner institutions and a few provide an alternative route by which students enter mainstream university learning programmes. Some of the partnerships result in joint (or "hybrid") qualifications between the partnering institutions.
In almost all these partnerships, private partner institutions are junior partners and are given very little academic responsibilities. Indeed, some public and private institutions use these partnerships for commercial purposes. The study found that, in most cases, public institutions made use of partnerships rather than developing their own infrastructure for distance education provision. This meant that these students did not have access to essential resources such as books, libraries, computers, Internet access and computer training centres, with the result that the quality of learning in partnerships is often questionable. In some contracts, partnership students could access the resources and facilities of the public partner institutions, but because many of these students lived far from the public institutions – the very reason why they enrolled through private institutions in the first place – access to these resources was almost impossible. "There was and still is a high demand for face-to-face tuition through distance education, especially in the fields of commerce and business management, education and training, and, computer studies . HE remains a social good, even if it is offered in the form of partnerships with private institutions. "Besides trying to meet the imperatives of transformation by admitting black students through the partnerships route, these public institutions also sought to meet this demand. When these partnerships – which covered the majority of partnership students – were terminated, there were no alternative measures or replacement programmes available to fulfil this need," says Mabizela. He believes, however, that HE in the form of partnerships with private institutions should be subjected to the same rules and regulations as public institutions. "Partnership provision of HE should not be left to develop unchecked, especially with regard to quality", Mabizela says.
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