Low-Income Students, Human Development and Higher Education in South Africa: Opportunities, obstacles and outcomes

Abstract

This book explores learning outcomes for low-income rural and township youth at five South African universities. The book is framed as a contribution to southern and Africa-centred scholarship, adapting Amartya Sen’s capability approach and a framework of key concepts: capabilities, functionings, context, conversion factors, poverty and agency to investigate opportunities and obstacles to achieved student outcomes. This approach allows a reimagining of ‘inclusive learning outcomes’ to encompass the multi-dimensional value of a university education and a plurality of valued cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes for students from low-income backgrounds whose experiences are strongly shaped by hardship. Based on capability theorising and student voices, the book proposes for policy and practice a set of contextual higher education capability domains and corresponding functionings orientated to more justice and more equality for each person to have the opportunities to be and to do what they have reason to value. The book concludes that sufficient material resources are necessary to get into university and flourish while there; the benefits of a university education should be rich and multi-dimensional so that they can result in functionings in all areas of life as well as work and future study; the inequalities and exclusion of the labour market and pathways to further study must be addressed by wider economic and social policies for ‘inclusive learning outcomes’ to be meaningful; and that universities ought to be doing more to enable black working-class students to participate and succeed. Low-Income Students, Human Development and Higher Education in South Africamakes an original contribution to capabilitarian scholarship: conceptually in theorising a South-based multi-dimensional student well-being higher education matrix and a rich reconceptualisation of learning outcomes, as well as empirically by conducting rigorous, longitudinal in-depth mixed-methods research on students’ lives and experiences in higher education in South Africa. The audience for the book includes higher education researchers, international capabilitarian scholars, practitioners and policy-makers.

Higher education, ICTs and inclusion: Assessing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Briefly, the capabilities approach popularized by Sen (1993), focuses on what people are able to do and be, based on their capabilities: "The capability approach, to a person's advantage, is concerned with evaluating it in terms of his or her actual ability to achieve various valuable functionings as a part of living" (Sen 1993, p. 30). Capability, in this case, means the opportunity and freedom to make choices, which, in turn, will impact how one is able to achieve being or doing or functioning (Walker et al, 2022).…”

“…In a study of higher education and inclusion in South Africa using the capability approach, Walker et al (2022) highlight that the capability approach reveals that material resources are just one of the factors contributing to inequalities in access because the ability to use these resources are conditioned by other contextual conversion factors. Using the capability approach to analyze access to ICTs in the Philippines, Alampay (2003) also argues that it is not only access to devices or proximity to technology that condition the ability to benefit from ICTs.…”

A capabilitarian approach to decolonising curriculum

“…Briefly, the context is one of persistent colonial and apartheid inequalities manifest in widespread multi-dimensional poverty (exacerbated by the pandemic), one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, and wealth and income inequality. This influences higher education conditions; while by headcount the majority of students are now black, by participation rate the numbers are still skewed for black and white students, while low-income students have biographies of poor quality schooling and severe material challenges which do not prepare them well for university participation or for their wellbeing in higher education in the face of worries about money and about the academic work (Walker et al, 2022). Then, in 2015 student protests began at the University of Cape Town in protest against the statue of Cecil Rhodes, and spread across the country as students demanded decolonisation of the curriculum and fees-free higher education (Jansen and Walters, 2022), continuing their protests into 2016 and recurring year on year since over financial exclusions at the point of registering for the new academic year.…”

“…Testimonial injustice occurs, Fricker (2007) explains, when identity prejudice (of race, class, gender, language and so on) leads a hearer to assign a reduced level of credibility to a person when they speak. For example, one student in our recent research project (Walker et al, 2022) explained that, because she is ethically Mpondo, she was regarded as being 'farm people' and 'ignorant' by other black students in her classes. Or, a black, rural student may not be able to articulate her question or her ideas because of her lack of confidence in using English (itself a colonial cognitive conversion factor).…”

“…The student may end up being silenced or silencing herself to avoid epistemic humiliation. To take an example from the same research project (Walker et al, 2022), one of the participating students, Anathi recounted that:…”