BY AKANYANG MEREMENTSI
Professor Jonathan Jansen, Rector of the University of Free State, wrote a brilliant article in the Times newspaper yesterday in which he advised the Grade 10 “students to be sent to university before they finish high school”. And just who will pay?
This is one of the noble ideas thought by someone as senior in a tertiary level as Jansen. Not even the ministry of higher education has thought of it. Anyway, this should be welcome, I think. Jansen saw this as a solution to the “damaging loss of money and talent that comes with tens of thousands of South African students dropping out of university”.
Jansen wrote at the time:
“The consequences of failure and drop-out are devastating: universities lose funding resources, parents lose out on hard-earned savings invested in their children, students lose confidence in their ability to gain a university education, and the country fails to gain another skilled graduate from university.”
He said these consequences were not only ‘devastating’ for students, but that they were as equally devastating to their families, the universities themselves and the country at large. Unfortunately, few universities had come up with ‘imaginative solutions to an old problem’ of ‘high drop-out rates’.
In his great proposal, Jansen said, for example, a university should go to Grade 10 pupils by offering them the option of going to university “every Saturday morning from 9am to 3pm where [they] can do either Psychology I or Chemistry I or Accountancy I over a three-year period – during [their] senior high school years”. This, said Jansen, as an effort to bridge the ‘gap between a poor school education and a demanding university training [that] will be too much’ for them as they were likely ‘destined to drop out’.
This will further provide an opportunity for students to:
- Gain the one thing that first-generation university students desperately need – university knowledge,
- Learn how to take summary notes in large classes,
- Learn to use the computer as a tool for learning,
- Learn to find their way through a university library using both online resources as well as sources in the stacks,
- Learn to work on complex problems in psychology or accounting in groups consisting of talented but equally disadvantaged students from other schools,
- Learn to consult with tutors and professors,
- Learn to find their way through the campus buildings, and
- Learn to find their own voices in classrooms, laboratories and seminars.
He said students would learn ‘disciplinary knowledge’ in one of the three subject areas and gain the ‘skills and the confidence to negotiate’ their way through what is often a frightening experience: university life. However, it was acknowledged that this may not be the solution to the ‘high drop-out rates’ but it was worth exploring and was likely to attract negativity from some quarters.
“This kind of innovation demands the best university teachers and an intensive model of academic support. A strong mentorship programme is critical and open, regular feedback is important to guide [students] over the three-year period. But once these foundations have been laid, [students] would have the competence and confidence to deal with the rigours of university life, including lousy university teachers”, said Jansen at the time.
He said one of the important and acknowledged advantages of this proposal is that should students pass these three while at high school, they could gain the credits for the course once they register at the university offering this plan. “[They] would not have to pay a cent for the course and, in addition, [they] will have a lighter first-year load than other students.”
This is one hell of a brilliant plan/strategy/proposal; however, there is something which either Jansen forgot to mention or someone missed. And before I say that, a friend of mine warned me the other day, as a society, of always attaching ‘value’ whenever we talk of progress, change and developments. He was referring to name changes of cities, streets, municipalities and special venues and the nationalisation of the country’s mines and how much these were likely to cost the tax payers.
With this now said, so, Prof: who is going to pay for these ‘Saturday classes’ for these pupils and just how many universities, yours included, are willing to do that if they cannot afford to assist their ‘financially struggling’ students?
Akanyang Merementsi blogs at Akanyang Africa.
Tags: education, jonathan jansen, university