Introduction
“There is inadequate convergence of government and university interests… Africa’s own son, Barack Obama is twice a father to the most powerful research oriented nation in the world. Africans want better services from their national governments yet hardly any universities are interfacing or engaging with governments to provide research evidence that informs the policies that impact such desired services.”
Throughout much of the post-independence period, a university degree in Africa functioned as a widely accepted mechanism for upward social mobility, professional recognition, and economic stability. States and households alike regarded higher education as the primary instrument for national development and individual advancement.
In recent decades, however, the correspondence between educational attainment and socioeconomic outcomes has weakened across much of the continent. Graduate unemployment, credential inflation, and growing public scepticism toward universities are now widespread. This account explores the structural and institutional factors that have eroded the returns to tertiary study, examines how this erosion manifests in labour markets and public perception, and reflects on the implications for policy, equity, and intergenerational aspiration.
1. EXPANSION WITHOUT ABSORPTION
The central driver of diminished value is the mismatch between the expansion of enrolment and the economy’s capacity to absorb graduates into formal, high-skill employment.
Following the adoption of “Education for All” policies and the liberalisation of higher education, enrolment in sub-Saharan Africa increased markedly. The phenomenon of “expansion without absorption” captures a structural disjuncture that has come to define much of Africa’s post-university landscape.
On one side, higher education systems across the continent have undergone rapid quantitative expansion whilst on the other, the structure of African economies has not generated commensurate demand for graduates. The result is a persistent mismatch between the supply of credentialed labour and the absorptive capacity of the formal economy.
A. The Dynamics of Expansion
Following the liberalisation of higher education and the adoption of mass-access policies from the 1990s onward, African states and private actors significantly increased institutional supply. South Africa’s university enrolment more than doubled between 1994 and 2024. Nigeria now hosts over 150 universities, Ghana nearly 100, and distance-learning platforms have widened geographic reach. This expansion responded to legitimate social demand: a young, growing population seeking mobility and families viewing the degree as a pathway out of poverty.
However, the mode of expansion was largely quantitative and cost-driven. To accommodate larger cohorts under fiscal constraint, institutions proliferated low-cost programmes in humanities, commerce, and social sciences. Investment in laboratories, clinical training, engineering workshops, and faculty research time lagged. Consequently, growth occurred without a parallel rise in instructional quality or curricular relevance.
B. The Limits of Absorption
Absorption depends on the structure of labour demand. Most African economies remain characterised by three features that constrain the uptake of graduates:
First, the productive base is narrow. Agriculture, informal services, and low-productivity micro-enterprises dominate employment. These sectors generate limited demand for analytical, technical, or managerial skills typically associated with a university degree.
Second, formal job creation has not kept pace with graduate output. Nigeria produces approximately 600,000 graduates annually against an estimated 500,000 new formal jobs. In South Africa, graduate unemployment stood at 9.2% in early 2026, but underemployment—graduates working in roles not requiring a degree—reached 41%. The core problem is not solely joblessness, but occupational mismatch.
Third, the skills produced often do not align with the skills demanded. Employer surveys across the region consistently report deficits in practical competence, adaptability, and technological readiness among graduates. Curricula remain outdated or imported, with limited engagement with local industries, indigenous knowledge systems, or pressing challenges such as climate adaptation, agro-processing, and digital transformation.
2. THE MECHANISM OF MISMATCH
The mismatch operates through three interlocking mechanisms:
A. Credential Inflation
Credential inflation occurs as employers respond to an oversupply of degrees by raising entry thresholds. Positions that once required a diploma now require a bachelor’s degree, and some bachelor-level roles now demand a master’s. Each level of qualification is devalued, compelling students to invest more time and money for unchanged occupational outcomes.
B. Signalling Failure
Signalling Failure emerges when a degree ceases to reliably signal competence. In the absence of credible quality assurance across hundreds of unregulated private providers, employers discount credentials from non-elite institutions and resort to alternative screening: personal networks, unpaid internships, and foreign qualifications. This disadvantages graduates from institutions with weaker reputations and reproduces inequality.
C. Private Return Erosion
Private return erosion follows. With tuition rising and public subsidies declining in real terms, households finance degrees through debt, asset sales, or remittances. Yet starting salaries for generalist graduates in markets like South Africa average around R12,000 per month, implying break-even periods exceeding 14 years. When the financial cost is high and the income differential marginal, the net present value of the degree declines.
3. THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN QUANTITY AND QUALITY
The African case illustrates that massification alone does not produce development outcomes. East Asia’s expansion succeeded because it was coupled with a disciplined alignment of educational output to industrial policy, quality assurance, and labour market signals. In contrast, Africa’s expansion has often been decoupled from productive transformation. Spending on education as a share of GDP in countries like Cabo Verde exceeds that of Germany or Korea, yet the socioeconomic return remains lower because the quality and relevance of learning are not guaranteed.
4. IMPLICATIONS
This mismatch has consequences beyond the labour market. It erodes public confidence in universities as engines of mobility and nation-building. It intensifies household financial strain and fuels disillusionment among youth, contributing to brain drain. It also risks delegitimising the public investment in higher education if the institution is perceived as disconnected from national development needs.
The mismatch is not inevitable. Where curricula are co-designed with industry, as seen in Rwanda’s University of Global Health Equity and Ghana’s Ashesi University, placement rates exceed 90%. Where technical and vocational pathways are elevated to parity of esteem and co-funded by employers, as in the German model, pressure on universities to absorb all post-secondary aspirants is reduced.
The mismatch between expansion and absorption in Africa reflects a broader failure to integrate higher education policy with industrial and employment policy. Expansion increased access, but without structural transformation of the economy and without curricular reform, it produced credentialing without competence. Addressing the mismatch requires repositioning universities as institutions whose value is measured not by enrolment numbers alone, but by their capacity to cultivate the intellectual and technical capabilities needed to solve Africa’s concrete problems.
In South Africa, university headcount rose from 495,000 in 1994 to 1.1 million in 2024. Similar growth occurred through new public institutions, private providers, and distance-learning platforms.
Yet this growth in graduate supply has not been matched by equivalent growth in demand. Many African economies remain dominated by agriculture, informal services, and low-productivity enterprises that generate limited demand for degree holders.
Nigeria produces approximately 600,000 graduates annually, while formal job creation remains near 500,000. Consequently, a structural oversupply emerges: the degree, once a marker of scarcity, increasingly signals abundance.
The labour market data illustrate the outcome. In South Africa’s first quarter of 2026, headline graduate unemployment stood at 9.2%, but underemployment—graduates employed in roles not requiring a degree—reached 41%. The principal issue is therefore not merely joblessness, but a persistent skills-occupation mismatch.
Expansion has often occurred under fiscal constraint, leading to reduced per-student funding and declining instructional quality. Overcrowded lecture halls, under-resourced libraries, inadequate laboratories, and heavy teaching loads constrain pedagogy to rote learning and examination performance rather than critical inquiry.
Employers increasingly report deficits in practical skills, work readiness, and adaptability to technological change among graduates. The disconnection between curricula and labour market needs is pronounced in disciplines where programs in humanities and social sciences have proliferated due to low delivery costs, while investment in engineering, clinical sciences, and technical training has lagged. Only 18% of engineering graduates across sub-Saharan Africa are women, further compounding sectoral inequality.
Moreover, many curricula remain imported or outdated, with limited engagement with local industries, indigenous knowledge systems, or regional challenges such as climate change, food security, and digital transformation. This perceived irrelevance undermines the value of university training for both employers and students.
Not all cases follow this trajectory. Rwanda’s University of Global Health Equity and Carnegie Mellon University Africa report placement rates above 90% in biotech, enabled by state subsidies for STEM and industry co-designed curricula.
Ashesi University in Ghana achieves similar outcomes through integrated liberal arts, technology, and ethics programs. Kenya’s tech ecosystem also draws heavily from non-traditional bootcamps. These examples suggest that diminished value attaches to institutional design and alignment, rather than to the degree itself.
5. CREDENTIAL INFLATION AND SIGNALLING FAILURE
The proliferation of tertiary qualifications across Africa has initiated a process of credential inflation with significant implications for both labour markets and the signalling function of higher education.
As degrees become more widely held, employers respond by elevating the formal qualifications required for entry-level positions. Roles that were previously accessible with a diploma increasingly stipulate a bachelor’s degree, while positions once attainable with a bachelor’s now often demand a master’s qualification. This incremental escalation does not correspond to a substantive change in the nature of the work itself. Rather, it reflects an attempt by employers to re-establish scarcity in a saturated labour market. Consequently, each level of qualification is devalued, and individuals are compelled to undertake additional years of study merely to maintain competitiveness for occupations that remain structurally unchanged.
Compounding this dynamic is the rapid expansion of unregulated private providers. The proliferation of institutions operating with minimal oversight has given rise to concerns regarding academic standards and the integrity of qualifications. Documented cases of degree mills, plagiarism, and examination malpractice have eroded public confidence in the credibility of credentials, particularly those obtained outside established public universities.
The effects of this erosion are not uniformly distributed across academic fields. Professional bodies in medicine, engineering, and law maintain stringent accreditation and licensing requirements that restrict supply and enforce minimum standards. As a result, graduates in these disciplines continue to command wage premiums and relatively stable employment outcomes. By contrast, the crisis is concentrated in unregulated programmes—particularly general Bachelor of Arts, Commerce, and Social Science streams—where hundreds of private colleges operate with limited quality assurance.
When a degree ceases to function as a reliable signal of competence, employers resort to alternative mechanisms of screening. Recruitment increasingly relies on personal networks, unpaid internships, and the prestige of foreign credentials. These substitutes for formal qualifications tend to favour candidates with pre-existing social and financial capital, thereby disadvantaging graduates from institutions with weaker reputations or limited industry linkages.
The gendered dimension of this failure is evident in contexts such as South Africa, where female graduates experience unemployment rates of approximately 30%, compared to 25% for male graduates, despite higher enrolment rates among women. This disparity suggests that signalling failure in the labour market is not neutral but intersects with existing structures of inequality.
6. FINANCING BURDENS AND DECLINING PRIVATE RETURNS
The liberalisation of higher education across much of Africa has reconfigured the financing burden of tertiary study, transferring a substantial share of costs from the state to students and their families. Public subsidies for universities have declined in real terms over successive fiscal cycles, while tuition fees at both public and private institutions have risen correspondingly. At the University of Cape Town, for instance, average annual fees for 2026 are projected at R75,000, a level that places sustained financial strain on middle- and lower-income households.
To mitigate these costs, many students rely on state-supported financing mechanisms such as the National Student Financial Aid Scheme in South Africa. Yet participation in these schemes frequently results in the accumulation of substantial debt by graduation. Elsewhere on the continent, student loan programmes exist but remain limited in scope and are often undermined by high nominal interest rates, short repayment horizons, and weak enforcement mechanisms that reduce their effectiveness as instruments of access.
For households unable to access adequate public or private credit, financing a degree necessitates alternative strategies: the liquidation of household assets, reliance on remittances from domestic or diasporic kin, or recourse to informal indebtedness. These strategies convert the pursuit of higher education into a high-risk intergenerational investment.
The economic rationale for this investment is increasingly contested. In South Africa, starting salaries for graduates in generalist Bachelor of Arts programmes average approximately R12,000 per month, implying a break-even period of over fourteen years before tax. When the direct financial outlay is high and the anticipated income differential is either marginal or deferred, the net present value of the degree declines. Under such conditions, families begin to reassess the comparative returns of tertiary education against alternative pathways, including vocational training, apprenticeships, and direct entry into informal or entrepreneurial activities.
7. THE PUBLIC GOOD AND THE LEGITIMACY CRISIS
Historically, higher education in Africa was conceived and legitimised as a public good, tasked with producing the teachers, doctors, engineers, and civil servants required for state formation and national development. This normative mandate positioned the university as an institution serving collective, rather than purely private, interests.
In recent decades, however, this mandate has been progressively weakened by three interrelated processes: commercialisation, political interference, and institutional instability.
First, the commercialisation of universities has reoriented institutional priorities toward revenue generation. Parallel fee-paying programmes, consultancy services, and investments in property development have become significant income streams. While these activities have alleviated fiscal pressures, they have at times diverted resources and managerial attention from core functions of teaching, research, and knowledge production.
Second, political interference in university governance has compromised institutional autonomy. Appointments to senior academic and administrative positions are frequently subject to political considerations, and interventions in curriculum and academic affairs have constrained intellectual independence. Such intrusions undermine the university’s capacity to function as an autonomous site of critical inquiry.
Third, persistent institutional instability—manifested in protracted strikes by academic and non-academic staff, delayed salary payments, and deteriorating physical and academic infrastructure—has disrupted academic calendars and degraded the quality of the student experience. Recurrent closures and uncertainty erode continuity in learning and diminish the perceived value of the credential.
In combination, these trends have contested the university’s claim to act in the public interest. As its operational logic increasingly resembles that of a market actor and its autonomy is constrained by external political forces, the university’s moral authority as a space for independent thought and civic formation is diminished.
8. DEMOGRAPHIC PRESSURE AND YOUTH ASPIRATIONS
Africa’s demographic structure intensifies the structural strain on its higher education systems. The continent possesses the youngest population globally, and each year a growing cohort of secondary school leavers seeks admission to tertiary institutions. This demographic pressure generates substantial political impetus to expand access, as governments face expectations to accommodate rising social demand for post-secondary education.
However, the fiscal and institutional capacity required to sustain both the scale and quality of this expansion has not kept pace. The outcome is a process of massification without transformation: universities admit larger student bodies while operating under constrained resources, leading to overcrowded facilities, inadequate instructional support, and limited engagement with labour market needs. Students frequently enter with expectations shaped by familial sacrifice and societal narratives of mobility, only to encounter learning environments characterised by under-resourced libraries, outdated curricula, and limited mentorship.
The disillusionment that follows has broader social consequences. It contributes to growing frustration among educated youth, erodes confidence in meritocratic pathways, and accelerates skilled emigration as graduates seek opportunities abroad.
Nonetheless, countervailing dynamics moderate this picture. Nigeria’s medical diaspora, for example, remits substantial funds that finance the education of siblings and relatives at home, creating channels of private investment in human capital. Similarly, Ghanaian academics based in foreign institutions increasingly deliver virtual instruction and mentorship to domestic universities, illustrating emerging forms of “brain circulation” that partially offset the losses associated with outward migration.
9. STUDENT AGENCY AND ADAPTIVE STRATEGIES
Framing students exclusively as passive recipients of a dysfunctional system overlooks the adaptive strategies they employ within it.
On many African campuses, the university degree operates as more than a labour market signal. It functions as a form of social infrastructure that provides access to urban networks, institutional visibility, and platforms for informal economic activity. Students routinely leverage residential and peer networks to engage in forex trading, private tutoring, and small-scale commerce, using the university environment as both a market and a base of operations. For some rural households, securing a child’s placement in an urban university remains a deliberate strategy for acquiring social capital, institutional connections, and access to religious or political networks, irrespective of immediate employment prospects.
Concurrently, a growing number of students pursue online micro-credentials and short, skill-based certifications in parallel with their formal degree programmes. This dual approach allows them to satisfy familial and societal expectations associated with holding a university qualification, while simultaneously acquiring marketable skills that generate income and enhance employability in the short term.
In this context, the value of the credential has not disappeared, but its function has shifted. Rather than serving as a guarantee of formal employment, the degree increasingly operates as a multi-use asset: a source of legitimacy, a gateway to networks, and a scaffold for diverse economic and social strategies.
10. PATHWAYS TO REEVALUATION
The diminishing value of higher education is not inevitable. Reversing the trend requires reconfiguring relationships between universities, states, industry, and society.
First, curricula must align with national development priorities and emerging sectors such as renewable energy, agro-processing, digital services, and creative industries. This requires structured partnerships where employers participate in programme design, workplace learning, and research collaboration.
Second, technical and vocational education and training must attain parity of esteem with university study. In South Africa, TVET colleges remain stigmatised, while universities capture approximately 85% of post-school budgets. The German model, where industry co-funds TVET, co-designs curricula, and guarantees employment pathways, illustrates an alternative not yet adopted.
Third, governance reform within universities must protect academic freedom, ensure transparent financial management, and prioritise pedagogical improvement. Public financing models should balance access with quality through differentiated subsidies that prioritise strategically important fields.
Finally, public discourse must be recalibrated. The assertion that a degree guarantees employment is no longer tenable. A more accurate narrative would present tertiary education as one component of a broader ecosystem of learning, skill acquisition, and entrepreneurship, whose value depends on its connection to real problems and on graduate agency. Micro-credentials and apprenticeships should be integrated as complements rather than substitutes.
11. CONCLUSION
The diminished perceived value of higher education in Africa arises from the intersection of three structural conditions: expansion without corresponding structural transformation of the economy, credentialing without the assurance of competence, and public investment without commensurate accountability mechanisms. The consequences of this misalignment are discernible across multiple domains. In labour markets, graduate output exceeds the absorptive capacity of the formal economy, producing underemployment and credential inflation. In household finances, the cost of acquiring a degree has risen while its marginal income returns have stagnated or become uncertain. At the institutional level, the university’s legitimacy as a national actor in knowledge production and civic formation has been contested by perceptions of inefficiency and disconnection from societal needs.
Notwithstanding these challenges, the underlying societal demand for knowledge, technical skill, and formal certification remains robust. Young Africans continue to regard learning as a pathway to personal and collective advancement, and African societies retain an objective need for expertise in health, agriculture, engineering, governance, and digital transformation.
Restoring the value of higher education will therefore require confronting difficult trade-offs concerning access, quality, cost, and institutional purpose. It necessitates policy choices that balance the imperative of mass participation against the need for rigorous standards and relevance to local development challenges.
Higher education alone cannot generate employment or resolve structural inequality. Its function is not to substitute for industrial policy or labour market reform. Rather, its contribution lies in cultivating the intellectual and technical capacities required to diagnose problems, imagine alternatives, and design solutions suited to African contexts. When reoriented toward this mission, the value of the university is no longer measured solely by private earnings differentials. It is recognised instead as foundational infrastructure for the construction of collective futures.
THE FOLLOWING IS A DEBATE BETWEEN ANDILE MSINDWANA AND MARTIN MUNUHWA:
MARTIN: Thanks for your opinion piece.
I want to share a contrarian perspective:
The opinion piece by Andile Msindwana raises important concerns about unemployment, underfunding, and structural mismatch in African higher education. However, its central thesis—that higher education in Africa is undergoing a broad “diminishing value”—rests on selective framing, economic reductionism, and an underestimation of the adaptive and developmental role universities continue to play across the continent. 
A stronger interpretation is not that higher education is losing value, but that African economies and governance systems have failed to evolve rapidly enough to fully utilize the expanding pool of educated citizens. The crisis, therefore, is less a failure of universities than a failure of economic transformation and state coordination.
First, the article conflates labour market difficulty with educational worth. Graduate underemployment is presented as evidence that degrees are increasingly meaningless.  Yet this assumes the sole value of higher education lies in immediate formal-sector employment. That assumption is analytically narrow. Universities produce far more than employees: they cultivate civic participation, scientific capacity, political consciousness, entrepreneurship, institutional leadership, and social mobility across generations.
Historically, African universities played central roles in anti-colonial movements, state formation, public administration, and intellectual production. Their contribution cannot be measured only through wage premiums or “break-even periods.” The article itself later acknowledges that degrees increasingly function as “social infrastructure” and gateways to networks, legitimacy, and entrepreneurial activity.  This directly weakens the earlier claim that higher education’s value is fundamentally diminishing. What is occurring is a transformation of value, not necessarily its erosion.
Second, the piece exaggerates the uniqueness of Africa’s credential inflation problem. Credential inflation is a global phenomenon, not an African anomaly. In the United States, Europe, India, and China, employers increasingly demand degrees for jobs that previously did not require them. The expansion of higher education worldwide naturally reduces the scarcity premium once attached to degrees. That does not mean education has become worthless; rather, it reflects the normalization of tertiary education in modern economies.
Indeed, the article’s own examples undermine its pessimistic framing. It notes that institutions such as Ashesi University, Carnegie Mellon University Africa, and Rwanda’s University of Global Health Equity achieve placement rates above 90%.  This demonstrates that when universities align with innovation ecosystems and national priorities, outcomes remain exceptionally strong. The issue is therefore not “higher education” itself, but uneven institutional quality and weak economic ecosystems.
Third, the article underestimates the long-term developmental importance of mass access to higher education. Expansion is portrayed largely as “quantity without quality.”  Yet restricting access in the name of quality would reproduce colonial-era educational exclusion, where only small elites could access universities. Massification has allowed millions of Africans from rural and working-class backgrounds to enter professions historically closed to them.
Even where labour markets lag behind, educational expansion still produces important social gains:
- reduced population growth rates, ( may be a disadvantage if we consider market expansion and geopolitical factors)
- improved public health awareness,
- increased political participation,
- higher female empowerment,
- stronger democratic accountability,
- and greater social mobility across generations.
These benefits are rarely captured in wage-based analyses but remain central to development.
The article also places disproportionate responsibility on universities for problems rooted in macroeconomic structures. African economies remain heavily dependent on raw commodity exports, weak industrialization, and low manufacturing complexity.  Universities cannot independently solve structural unemployment when states have failed to implement coherent industrial policy, energy security, infrastructure modernization, or technological upgrading.
In fact, the existence of unemployed graduates may indicate not educational excess, but economic underdevelopment. South Korea, Singapore, and China did not reduce university enrolment because graduate numbers exceeded jobs in the short term; instead, they expanded industrial and technological sectors capable of absorbing skilled labour over time. Africa’s challenge is therefore not “too many graduates,” but too little structural transformation.
Moreover, the article’s treatment of humanities and social sciences is overly dismissive.  It implies that these fields proliferate mainly because they are “low-cost” and less economically useful. This technocratic framing ignores the fact that governance, law, education, diplomacy, journalism, ethics, public policy, and democratic institutions all depend heavily on social science and humanities training. Africa’s governance crises are not caused by an excess of philosophy or sociology graduates, but often by deficits in ethical leadership, institutional accountability, and civic reasoning.
Another weakness is the implicit assumption that employability depends primarily on curriculum alignment. While curriculum reform is important, labour markets are shaped by investment levels, political stability, energy supply, technological infrastructure, and access to capital. A perfectly designed curriculum cannot create jobs in an economy experiencing deindustrialization or stagnant growth. By focusing heavily on university reform, the article risks obscuring the responsibility of governments and private sectors to create productive economies.
The piece also insufficiently recognizes the resilience and innovation emerging within African higher education systems themselves. Across the continent:
- universities are integrating digital learning,
- students are combining degrees with micro-credentials,
- research hubs are emerging in fintech, health, AI, and agriculture,
- and partnerships with global institutions are expanding rapidly.
Africa’s technology ecosystems in Nairobi, Lagos, Kigali, Cape Town, and Accra are increasingly staffed by university graduates who combine formal education with entrepreneurial adaptation. These developments suggest evolution and diversification, not collapse.
Finally, the article’s conclusion ultimately contradicts its own thesis. It concedes that African societies retain a robust demand for expertise in engineering, agriculture, governance, medicine, and digital transformation, and that universities remain foundational for solving African problems.  If higher education remains indispensable to national development, then its value has not fundamentally diminished. What has diminished is the outdated expectation that a degree automatically guarantees elite employment.
That distinction matters enormously.
The real transition underway is from an era where degrees guaranteed scarcity-based privilege to one where education functions as one component within a broader ecosystem of skills, innovation, adaptability, and economic transformation. Universities are no longer automatic pipelines to middle-class security, but they remain essential institutions for building modern states, knowledge economies, and democratic societies.
In that sense, African higher education is not collapsing in value. It is being forced to redefine its purpose in a changing global and continental economy.
ANDILE: I hear your views. I have mine…I’ll reflect when the time is right. Thanks for spending time in the piece…
Let me share my stance in what you say. Firstly I’m of the view that as Africans we need education and not all is lost. It’s still doable.
Response to the Contrarian Perspective
Firstly, we all have views that are likely to differ.
Let’s stop hiding behind academic hedging. The contrarian piece, that I authored, makes some valid points as far as I can ascertain but it softens the diagnosis and lets the system off the hook.
- Call it what it is: credential devaluation, not “value transformation”
Yes, universities produce civic capacity, scientific literacy, and political consciousness. I don’t, for a second one deny that.
But for millions of students, the degree no longer signals competence. It signals that you survived a system where degree mills operate openly, exam malpractice is endemic, and employers bypass local graduates for foreign credentials and who-you-know networks.
That’s not “transformation.” That’s erosion. When students use campuses as bases for forex trading, tutoring, and hustle rather than as sites of knowledge production, it’s adaptation under duress. If the value now comes despite the university, not because of it, then we have a legitimacy crisis. Stop dressing it up.
- The economy failed. The university system failed too.
You’re right: no curriculum reform creates jobs in a deindustrialized economy with no power, no capital, no industrial policy. The state’s failure is primary.
But that doesn’t excuse the sector’s own collapse. We expanded enrolment without regulation, without quality floors, without consequences for institutions selling worthless paper. The result is a two-tier system: a handful of institutions plugged into innovation ecosystems with 90%+ placement, and hundreds of colleges mass-producing degrees the market doesn’t trust.
Ashesi, CMU Africa, UGHE don’t disprove my argument. They prove it. They’re outliers precisely because they refused to play the massification-without-quality game. The crisis is external and internal. To pretend it’s only the economy is to protect the rot inside the academy.
- Massification without quality is not liberation. It’s a con.
Restricting access reproduces colonial exclusion. I’m not arguing for that.
But expanding access without standards is not justice. It’s a bait-and-switch. Families sell land, take debt, delay life decisions for credentials that employers don’t respect. That’s not opportunity. That’s extraction.
And stop reducing this to “anti-humanities.” Governance, law, journalism, public policy depend on the humanities. The problem is unregulated, low-cost programs that can’t meet basic academic standards but still charge fees and issue degrees. That discredits every discipline Africa needs.
- The original piece already conceded your central point
You say: if African societies still need expertise, then higher education’s value hasn’t diminished. Correct.
What’s diminished is the lie that a degree guarantees middle-class security. That matters, because millions of households are still making decisions on that lie. A broken contract between the university, the state, and the public is still a breach.
So here’s the line in the sand.
We agree on the end goal: link university expansion to industrial and innovation policy. But we get there through honesty, not evasion.
- Shut down or rehabilitate unregulated providers. No more selling degrees with zero oversight.
- Tie public funding to outcomes and relevance. Stop paying for enrolment numbers alone.
- Force the state to deliver. No more expanding universities while the economy stagnates. Demand industrial policy, energy, infrastructure alongside access.
Access without quality is not progress. It’s betrayal.
If you want to debate sequencing, fine. But don’t pretend the university is a passive victim. It helped create this mess. It has a responsibility to help fix it. And it starts by telling the truth about what’s broken inside the gates.
MARTIN: Kkkkk we are probably backing the wrong trees.
- My history with bottleneck education is severe . Hedged in colonial and apartheid veils and that some of the geniuses like Einstein et al will never had made it to college if they applied bottlenecks.
- I believe in employability, the graduates should not only wait to complete to apply for jobs, they should instead create employment too!
- Quality with quantity is ideal if we have resources. This should be never be compromised.
- Graduates should of course be fit for purpose but the issue is who should be making the purpose and fit definition.
There is no wrong or right answer but I am sure my experience with both governments and universities gives me sneak peep of the inner workings.
ANDILE: Having worked in government and served as an academic at a university, and remaining engaged with an institution based in Bloemfontein, the conclusion is inescapable: academics require clearer guidance and stronger institutional safeguards.
Without defined orientation and structural support, well-intentioned academic work is susceptible to misdirection. Effort alone does not guarantee alignment with purpose; in the absence of coherent frameworks, it drifts.
It is also an established fact that academics require protection to preserve the integrity and autonomy of the university. This is not a matter of preference but a condition for credible scholarship and teaching.
Equally, it is not speculative to observe that certain degrees have ceased to function as de facto requirements for specific forms of employment. Hiring practices increasingly prioritize demonstrable skills, practical experience, and alternative credentials over formal qualifications alone.
This is a direct warning to prospective students and early-career professionals. The choice of educational pathway must be made with deliberate attention to how it aligns with evolving labour market realities. To ignore this shift is to risk investing time and resources in qualifications that no longer secure the access they once promised.
MARTIN: It’s quite clear that quality assurance and accreditation is compulsory to all institutions. This is a premise and precedent I am anchored on.
The reform must be cognitively supported by the quality assured graduates.
What I found concerning was the link to their employment a a direct correlation to their performance as we need to give them a chance.