Durban — Higher Education, Science and Technology Minister Blade Nzimande said the murder of women students in universities has highlighted the vulnerability of women students.
He said all universities were working together with higher health to seek and provide safe workplaces and learning spaces for all staff and students in the institutions.
Nzimande was speaking on Tuesday at a media briefing which aimed to address the state of readiness in the post-school education and training sector for the 2023 academic year.
He said higher health was currently implementing programmes towards addressing the challenges of sexual and gender-based violence, within the post-education training (PSET) system. He added that the department was working on solutions to mitigate the impact of load shedding on the sector.
Talking about TVET colleges, the minister said in the 2022 academic year more women candidates (72.1%) participated in the exams than male candidates (27.9%).
He appealed to prospective students who were still seeking spaces within the TVET colleges for entrylevel programmes to contact their colleges of choice for available enrolment spaces for the academic year. He said they were standardising the registration and admission processes in the TVET colleges, including the process of issuing certificates.
“The process will help us in the migration from the manual to online registration processes in all our TVET colleges,” he said.
Nzimande added that a robotics programme would be introduced in 10 colleges this academic year. He said this was part of the curriculum transformation strategy.
He said universities were projected to provide 1112439 spaces in the academic year.
He said some universities would extend their registrations which started on January 16 and were meant to end on February 20. Among the universities he said would extend their registration were the Durban University of Technology, University of Zululand, Mangosuthu University of Technology and Rhodes University.
He said more than 1.1 million applications had been received by the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS). He added that students who were beneficiaries of social grants would be registered without paying anything. Applicants for NSFAS have only seven days left to submit applications for funding. The applications opened on September 28, 2022 and close on January 31.
Nzimande said NSFAS had agreed with was released institutions to allow all confirmed NSFAS-funded students to register for the 2023 academic year. He said this arrangement also applied to all students who qualified under the Historic Debt Funds and Close Out Report.
“We will be able to fund all qualifying students on our bursary scheme who have been admitted for funded programmes at public TVET colleges and universities,” he said.
NSFAS would release application results for those who applied for funding for the first time and returning students on February 6, while the funded list for continuing students was released on Tuesday.
Daily News