Nonpayment Taking a Toll on South African Colleges

JOHANNESBURG — At St. Augustine College of South Africa, students took exams last month that were final in more ways than one. The only Roman Catholic university in South Africa recently decided to sell its campus in Victory Park, Johannesburg, and suspend its undergraduate program.

“It was really a shock,” said Siphiwe Ngwenya, a third-year student, recalling the announcement that the college was in a terminal financial crisis.

Still, Ms. Ngwenya acknowledged that she is one of the students who brought on the debacle. With no financial aid to supplement the wages of her single mother, she is still trying to pay off her $3,000 tuition months after it was due.

Denise Gordon-Brown, St. Augustine’s project manager, says Ms. Ngwenya has plenty of company in that regard. Half of the students are in arrears.

“When students aren’t paying,” Ms. Gordon-Brown said, “you reach the edge and have to say, ‘We can’t go on.”’

St. Augustine is the latest institution to be hit by a plague of unpaid tuition in South Africa. The problem makes funding a constant challenge for public universities — and nearly impossible for some private, nonprofit ones.

“It’s the most serious problem,” said Jeffrey Mabelebele, chief executive of Higher Education South Africa, an association of the country’s 23 public universities. “It has the potential to threaten the very operations of a university.”

The South African government and the large public universities have recognized the challenge, and most institutions are not in as precarious a position as St. Augustine’s. Annual tuition arrears range from less than one percent of billings at the University of Cape Town to just under 20 percent at the University of Zululand.

Still, “it will have to get better,” said Andre de Wet, director of finance at Zululand, which educates 16,000 students in the largely rural KwaZulu-Natal Province. “The writing is on the wall if you don’t collect your fees.”

Public universities are helped by a government program, the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, or N.S.F.A.S. In the past decade, the annual budget for loans and scholarships from the government has soared, to more than $800 million.

But financial aid still falls well short of accommodating a rising population of first-generation college students. At the University of Limpopo, in one of the country’s poorest provinces, 70 percent of the students receive limited N.S.F.A.S. funding. Nearly all qualify for full coverage, says Raymond Olander, the university’s chief financial officer, but each receives barely enough to pay half of the fees.

“They will go back to the community they come from, and each household will try to chip in a little bit,” he said.

Some students have chosen to fight rather than beg. Tshwane University of Technology, in Pretoria, closed for a week last year after violent student protests. Among the protesters’ demands were that students on the N.S.F.A.S. waiting list get their financial aid immediately, and that outstanding fees be “settled by someone capable to do so.”

Unable to rely on the government alone, university administrators have approached the student debt problem with a mixture of discipline and creativity.

The University of KwaZulu-Natal learned too late that acting as a lender of last resort is no solution, however. When bad debt threatened its financial standing in 2011, it stopped offering “gap loans,” to cover the difference between students’ N.S.F.A.S. funds and tuition. That decision prompted riots. Some 150 students were arrested. More than a year later, the university’s expenses for students’ “doubtful debts” are still $13 million, exceeding its expenditures for campus repairs and maintenance.

Both rich and poor universities enforce penalties against nonpayment of tuition. Most will not provide transcripts, diplomas, or registration for further classes until debts are cleared.

Adam Habib, vice chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand, said this leads to “big moral dilemmas,” especially if students are denied graduation.

Penalties can also lead to bad press. The University of Cape Town drew attention early this year when Joseph Khohlokoane, who had passed the requirements for a degree in social work 17 years ago, was discovered working as a janitor, apparently because he had been blocked from graduating.

The government responded by paying off his debt, and he finally graduated in June. Smarting from the publicity, Gerda Kruger, the university’s spokeswoman, told The Chronicle of Higher Education in an email that Mr. Khohlokoane had received $20,000 in financial aid during his studies, covering all but $1,100 of his educational expenses. She added that the university would tell any prospective employer whether or not a student had passed the requirements for a degree.

Back on St. Augustine’s leafy campus, however, even some of the students question whether their administration was tough enough on debtors.

“People became comfortable with the fact that the debt collectors were not coming after them,” said Agathe Fonkam, a second-year student from Cameroon. “Once you become comfortable, why force yourself to come up with the money if you can do it later, or maybe never?”

Ndamu Nemavhandu, a classmate, agreed. “They were very soft,” he said: “Maybe it’s the Catholic ethos.”

In the administration, Ms. Gordon-Brown agreed that the Catholic Church’s “preferential option for the poor” might have indirectly played a role in the college’s downfall.

The issue might not have been raised if St. Augustine students had enjoyed access to government financial aid, but “we get not a red cent from the state,” said Nicholas Rowe, head of the college’s School of Humanities and Education.

He also noted that St. Augustine, despite its accredited degree programs, from bachelor’s to Ph.D., was prevented by the government from marketing itself as a “university.” No private institution of higher education in South Africa can call itself a university.

This matters, because “colleges” in South Africa are usually high schools or trade schools. “People pass judgments,” said Cecelia Mogotsi, who is majoring in psychology and literature at St. Augustine. “They think people going to a college are stupid.”

Compared with the United States, “the space for private universities is very tightly controlled and restrained,” Mr. Rowe said. In South Africa, “the state basically says, ‘We won’t stop you from operating, but we are not obligated to do anything to help.’ ”

Ironically, St. Augustine College, still in its infancy, engendered a lot of hope not so long ago. Barely a decade old, and even with just 230 students, “it was one of our best private providers,” said Themba Mosia, vice principal for student affairs at the University of Pretoria and a former chair of the Council on Higher Education, an independent body that advises the minister of higher education.

The college will continue to operate graduate programs from a smaller facility — graduate students tend to pay their fees — but all of its undergraduates have applied to transfer to public universities.

As a high-school student, Mr. Nemavhandu set his sights on St. Augustine because a neighbor studying there seemed to be learning more than others were at big universities.

“I feel betrayed,” he said, before walking into a final exam. But “I did receive an education beyond what I ever thought I could receive.”

- nytimes.com