Chairperson, hon members, I will restrict my comments to higher education. I would like to start off by mentioning that the Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner once remarked that the one thing he learnt from dialectical materialism is that one cannot learn about the inner workings of complex systems by looking at how they break down and how they disintegrate. I take from Brenner the very important point that we must build on what works and fix what does not rather than destroy what works and fail to act on what does not.
There is a lot of strength in the higher education system. It is, though, under stress to meet two very important demands. The first demand is to grow a critical mass of graduate students mentored by a highly skilled professoriate in research environments that anticipate the challenges of the 21st century, including subject areas like climate change, global warming, pathogenic threats to health, food security, global governance design and social architecture that is required to have decent human habitation in a changing climate system.
Rapid growth of our graduate population to PhD level can occur at the five and possibly six high-end research universities we have if, however, undergraduate teaching responsibilities are reduced and resources normally used to deal with underprepared students are diverted to basic cost items.
The second demand is to respond to the increasing legitimate requirement for places at lower cost for undergraduate education. Parents across the country hold hopes and dreams that their children can successfully complete high school and go to university. It is factually true, on a material level, that completing high school will double one's income in the course of one's life, and having a bachelor's degree will quadruple one's income in the course of one's life. This is simply speaking about material rewards. Education, of course, is also about having the knowledge to master one's environment through one's life cycle. So, it is ultimately also about freedom through education.
To make all of these possible, we would recommend that the other universities, that is the rest of the universities after the five or six high-end research universities, be consolidated as undergraduate ones specialising in a four-year-long degree. This includes the so-called universities of technology. I say "so-called" because they are not quite universities of technology. This is an aspiration rather than a reality. We also recommend that the six undergraduate universities located in rural areas should specialise in agriculture, environmental science, food security, land reform and the social science and economics of a modern agrarian society.
Dr Cheryl de la Rey, of the Council on Higher Education, brought to our attention, unsurprisingly to everybody else, the fact that small class sizes and decent functional residences - and I want to underline this - contribute mightily to success rates. To achieve smaller class sizes requires a doubling in the lecturing staff at universities. Functional residences are particularly important to those students whose home environments are not conducive to learning. Just be a black student at the University of Cape Town and have to travel home, for example, to Khayelitsha and back. This undermines the capacity to learn.
I do not believe that there have been any significant capital expenditures on university residences over the last 15 years. Some universities have done what they could when it comes to maintenance. But speak to the Vice- Chancellor of the University of Fort Hare and he will tell you that their residences are in fact slums. If it has not done so yet, the department should conduct an audit of the residences with a view to systematically investing in them to become decent places of living and learning.
We were greatly disturbed by the fact that the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, NSFAS, had difficulty spending R49,5 million at university level and R12,7 million on the further education and training level when it comes to student bursaries. Universities declare, universities do the spending, and universities make the awards to students. Universities declared that they could not find enough students to meet the standard criteria.
A parent who earned too much money - it's not a lot of money, but too much money for bursary purposes - to have her son qualify for a bursary, but too little to borrow from a bank recently approached me for help. On the basis of this one particular case, we would suggest that the national student aid should revise their criteria to include academically capable students as far and wide as their fund permits. It is unacceptable that funding set aside for student bursaries is in fact not spent.
There is a bottleneck in our high school graduation performance, as we all know. In the area where the need is greatest - in the sciences, in my view - we are doing rather badly. Of a total of 297 417 students who wrote the Life Sciences Grade 12 examination in 2008, 39,6% passed at 40% and above and 70,5% passed at 30% and above. Bursaries or free education will not fix this problem, only better schooling will do.
Universities are the intellectual store of a nation. They are the incubators of new ideas. We invest the taxpayer's money in a lecturing population whose purpose it is to advance the frontiers of knowledge by anticipating the future and immersing our children, the future generations of South Africa, in knowledge about our place in the universe.
Two things follow from this. Firstly, new ideas are about innovation. Therefore, it is better for universities to be combined with science and technology rather than with the sector education and training authorities, Setas - bodies that are in any event dysfunctional and incapable themselves of serving the very important goal of advancing industrial skilling.
Secondly, we propose to spend R17 498 billion in this budget on universities in this coming financial year and, if one adds private and public expenditure on research and development, this vital area propels the knowledge economy. The role of the higher education sector is therefore crucial in dragging our country out of recession. I would like to cite two responses globally on this particular score for your interest. Firstly we have Germany, where an additional US$25 billion - at today's exchange rate it is about R200 billion - will be pumped into universities over the next 10 years. The money will be used to fund research, enhance university competitiveness and prepare for a rise in student numbers.
Second is the state of California, which has unfortunately cut the famous University of California system by US$800 million of a US$3,2 billion budget and the undergraduate state university sector by US$580 million of a US$2,7 billion budget. We believe that we should follow Germany; though, of course, we do not have the material base for that quantum of spending.
As they say in church, here endeth the lesson. But I just wanted to point out, for those of you who are interested, why Sydney Brenner took a course in dialectical materialism at the University of the Witwatersrand in the 1930s and 1940s. That is because it was required at the University of the Witwatersrand in the 1930s and 1940s for all science and medical students to take a course in the philosophy of science. [Interjections.] Thank you very much. [Time expired.]