From: shaze@cs.ubc.ca (Scott Hazelhurst)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african
Subject: Re: Absence of black postgrads
Date: 13 Nov 1992 08:51:52 -0800
Organization: Computer Science, University of B.C., Vancouver, B.C., Canada
NNTP-Posting-Host: pacific.cs.ubc.ca

heidi@ucthpx.uct.ac.za (Heidi de Wet) writes:
>rely on the collective earning power of an extended family.  Even 
>if such a family hasn't had to pay the university fees of a child, 
>they've lost that earning power for at least three years.  And the 
>marginal benefit to one's earning power of a postgraduate degree is 
>pretty low (or even negative - salaries in the academic world are 
>much lower than in business, as Riel mentioned :-)
>Before I get flamed by readers overseas, let me say I think this is
>an example of "African cultural values" (working for the good of 
>the extended family) which have largely been lost in Western culture.

I think that there is definitely something in this, and I have seen
black students starting to work rather do Hons for this reason.
Especially students who come from poor families often feel that
they have a responsibility to start working so as to help support 
their families and put younger siblings through school and university.
For these students postgrad education just isn't a high priority.
(After all, how many people on the net can say that they are doing/
did posgrad education purely for the interests of society?)

What about undergraduate education? That perhaps is where the priorities
for universities should be. In the sciences and engineering 
the primary problem here is the schooling situation,
and the lack of exposure that black students have to computers.
Do people think that putting computers in schools is a good idea?
There generally seem to be two reasons put forward for putting
computers in schools. One (which seems to be the most popular
among teachers I have spoken to) is CAI -- using computers
to teach other subjects, particularly maths. I  feel sceptical
about this, I think the money would be better spent on people. The
other is computer literacy, which makes a lot more sense. But then
is putting them (in large quantities) in schools a cost-effective
solution. Would it not be better to have centralised facilities.

One of the ways that many universities are trying to increase the
number of black students in the sciences and engineering is to have
intermediate programmes between school and university. Although
there have been some encouraging results, these programmes are
expensives, and seem to rely almost entirely on the largesse
(or otherwise) of the Anglo American & De Beer's Chairman's fund. It
isn't a mass education system.

Perhaps one way of doing this would be to organise some courses
for teachers (perhas over holidays). Outside funding may be
possible to get for something like this. The problem may be
that although there is a lot of pressure on teachers to
upgrade their qualifications, the DET only recognises formal
qualifications (for example through UNISA or Vista, rather
than non-formal training courses)

Another point which Heidi raised was the need for a diversified
training, and other types of tertiary education needs to be
stressed. Does anyone have any experience of these institutions. 
I think at least for the last ten years I have heard
speeches from education officials saying that non-university
education is going to be stressed, and nothing seems to happen.
What is the quality of these institutions like? All I know is 
from one talk I went to -- the speaker said that many of
technikons had good staff, and were well positioned to meet
training needs, but that many technikons were also filled with
deadweight of incompetent people who had been appointed to sinecures
a long time ago. How true this is I don't know

Related question for our connectivity guru: are any of the technikons
linked to Uninet?


Scott
-- 
---shaze@cs.ubc.ca----------------------------------------------------------
   Scott Hazelhurst