Challenging Neoliberal Global Capitalism in South African Higher Education Student Funding: A Decolonial Perspective

There is an increased institutionalised funding crisis in higher education in the global South. The public university in Africa, also in South Africa, is trapped in neoliberal frameworks that have seen higher education adopt privatisation, deregulation, and spending cuts in the provision of services, thus transforming higher education into a student-as-customer model where beneficiaries of an educational investment must pay for it. In turn, education as a private good results in the privileging of loans over grants and has widened the divide between the rich and poor. In this paper, I critique the neoliberal assumptions, ideas, and trends that guide higher education student funding policy and implementation as colonial, unjust, and discriminatory as they widen the divide between the rich and poor. I attempt to do three things in this paper, viz, provide an overview of the crisis in student funding in South African higher education within historical, political, economic, and social contexts. Secondly, I analyse the concepts of neoliberalism such as privatisation, deregulation, marketisation of higher education, education as a private good, and their implications for the South African higher education landscape. I then move on to discuss the troubling global capitalism in South African higher education student funding through a decolonial lens. The paper draws from the extant literature on the funding crisis in higher education in Africa and South Africa in particular. Based on that, the paper concludes that the commercialisation of funding is not a panacea for access and quality assurance issues in African universities. There is a need to shift from the Eurocentric location from which political economy paradigms are used in promulgating funding directives in the higher education systems in South Africa and the global South in general.