Education in South Africa - USSAS - University Scholarships for South African Students, Inc.

The South African Higher Education sector is, in a number of ways, rather different from the American college and university world Virtually all the institutions of higher post-secondary education in South Africa are funded and regulated by the state. There is almost no private sector in higher education. Furthermore, with the exception of certain peculiarities during the era of apartheid, it is the national government, and not the governments of the several provinces, that fund and oversee higher education.

South Africa has four categories of higher education institutions: Universities, Technikons, Teachers' Colleges, and Technical Colleges. The Universities are quite similar to universities in the United States or elsewhere, and a visitor familiar, say, with Yale or Michigan State or Vanderbilt would feel pretty much at home on a South African university campus. The Technikons, as the name suggests, are tertiary institutions devoted to vocationally oriented education, with degree programs in such practical fields as fashion design, computer technology, mining, and business. The Teachers' Colleges exist to train the men and women who teach at the elementary and secondary level in South Africa's schools. They award Certificates, not degrees. The Technical Colleges are little more than jumped up vocational high schools and play a very small role in the tertiary sector.

The first university to be established was the University of South Africa [UNISA]. Here is a brief history from UNISA’s home page:

The University of the Cape of Good Hope, renamed the University of South Africa in 1916, was created by Act 16 of 1873 of the Cape of Good Hope Parliament. Modelled on the University of London, it offered examinations but not tuition, and had the power to confer degrees upon successful examination candidates. Today, this function still exists within the Department of Music where, for over 100 years, music pupils have been examined.

The Royal Charter bestowed upon it by Queen Victoria in 1877 affirmed the status of the University and granted full recognition of its degrees throughout Britain and its colonies.

The change of name in 1916 was followed by other major changes, such as moving the University’s headquarters to Pretoria after two years. Incorporating, within a federal structure, a number of university colleges that subsequently became fully autonomous teaching universities became inevitable eg. the South African School of Mines and Technology (now University of the Witwatersrand) and the University Colleges of Natal, Rhodes, Bloemfontein, Potchefstroom, Zululand and Transvaal (now University of Pretoria).

In the 1940's with these universities and colleges becoming autonomous, Unisa stood at the crossroads : the need for extra tuition for students who studied by themselves and came to be examined was clear.

By 1944, a new vision of the institution as a teaching university began to emerge. During 1945 Professor AJH van der Walt was invited to investigate the possibility of devising and instituting a system of postal tuition for external (i.e. non-residential) students, and subsequently given the task of implementing just such a system. With the establishment of the Division of External Studies on 15 February 1946, South Africa’s first university also became the pioneer of tertiary distance education in the western world.