The obstinate notion that higher education is a meritocracy

Abstract

Student success is an enormous concern in light of the high drop-out rates in South African universities. There is a wealth of local and international research which provides complex explanations for these statistics, but the common-sense understanding is that those students who have the right attributes and who work hard will do well. While the notion of higher education as a meritocracy is pervasive, it is invalid given the effects of numerous other mechanisms at play in the students' educational experiences. This article draws from the literature to discuss the problems of the meritocratic explanation in how it fails to sufficiently account for the centrality of agency and the ways in which this intersects with societal structures. We argue that more useful understandings of student success and failure require social theory that acknowledges the complexities underpinning student success or failure.

Wayward academia—Wild, Connected, and Solitary Diffractions in Everyday Praxis

“…This addresses the habits (Aldrin Salskov, 2020;Love & Peltonen, 2017) as well as desires of academics and their publics (Berlant, 2011;Wiegman, 2016). With this autoethnographic reading, I join others who analyse exclusions as mechanisms of ontological and epistemological access (Sobuwa & McKenna, 2019;Winberg & Makua, 2019).…”

A social justice perspective on student counselling services

“…While acknowledging the constructive contribution of student counselling centres to student success, one also has to recognise that these centres are situated in HEIs that often embrace a problem-based paradigm and focus on students' deficits (O'Shea, Lysaght, Roberts & Harwood 2016;Smit 2012). Phrases like 'students' lack of readiness', 'the school system is unsuccessful in preparing students for the challenges of HE' and 'struggling students' imply that underprepared and underperforming students have deficiencies or experience problems that need to be addressed and that the possible negative outcomes thereof should be prevented (Dampier, Baker, Spencely, Edwards, White & Taylor 2019;Smit 2012;Sobuwa & McKenna 2019). Student counselling centres that function as entities in institutions where a 'student deficit' model reigns mostly embrace a medical model where preventative and curative services are prioritised.…”

Students' prior knowledge and threshold concepts in a first-year biology course: The lecturer as middleman

“…In South Africa there are differing levels of student preparedness for university, and factors external to the student can influence preparedness (Sobuwa and McKenna, 2019). First-year cohorts come from a range of school backgrounds and thus learning experiences, and this background experience is one external factor that could impact on preparedness (Dukhan, 2018).…”