THE PROBLEM WITH THE SOUTH AFRICAN EDUCATION SYSTEM
Amongst the vexing challenges facing
South Africa today is the high rate of unemployment, that is currently at 25.2%.
High levels of unemployment have persisted in South Africa even during the period
1994 to 2007 when GDP growth was relatively boisterous, picking at 5.6% in 2007[1].
What explains the economy’s failure to create jobs even in times of relative
prosperity (jobless growth) is that unemployment in South Africa is structural,
and is largely caused by low levels of skills in an economy that demands intermediate
to high-level skills. The challenge is therefore not that the economy is
failing to create jobs, but that the majority of those that are unemployed do
not possess the right skills to take advantage of available opportunities.
At the heart of this is an education
and training system that fails to adequately prepare young people either for
higher education and/or employment. Of the 439 779 matriculants that graduated
in 2013, only 30.6% obtained University entrance[2].
A shocking 46% of South African students dropout of University in their first
year[3].
Almost half of the pupils who should have written matric in 2013 had dropped
out of the system at the end of grade 10. These are just some of the indicators
of a poor schooling system that has consistently underperformed its peers on
the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Measuring Education Quality
(SAQMED).
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