Schooling inequality, higher education and the labour market: Evidence from a graduate tracer study in the Eastern Cape, South Africa

ABSTRACT

An emerging body of research has shown that there are large inequalities in access to higher education in South Africa. There remains a gap, however, in identifying how factors such as schooling background, academic performance, race and gender are linked with key higher education outcomes. In particular, the significance of these factors for first-choice degree attainment at university and in the subsequent transition to the labour market is of interest. This article addresses these questions by presenting a descriptive and multivariate analysis of data collected through a tracer study which interviewed graduates from two Eastern Cape universities. The results suggest that schooling background, race and gender are associated with study choices and unemployment. These findings have important implications both for equity and for the efficiency of higher education institutions. The article concludes with a discussion of potential policy responses and the implications for equity in higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• unemployment
• skills

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Rod Bally and Kevin Whitfield from the University of Fort Hare for their assistance in coordinating the research. Thanks must also go to the CHEC research team and to Haroon Bhorat for providing insight into the study methodology. Finally, the authors are indebted to Ulandi du Plessis and her field team, all of the respondents who gave generously of their time and the helpful comments of two anonymous reviewers.

The ideas, opinions, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are strictly those of the authors and do not represent those of the Department of Higher Education and Training.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹South Africa has one of the world's highest measures of intra-class correlation, which is a standardised indicator of variation in academic achievements (Branson & Zuze, 2012).

²Traditional universities offer theoretically-oriented degrees and are less vocational compared with comprehensive universities and universities of technology (see de Villiers et al., 2013).

³The sample was stratified by field of study – as categorised by the South African Classification of Educational Subject Matter (CESM) manual. The categories included: Science Engineering and Technology (SET), Business and Commerce, Education, and Humanities.

⁴Random (stratified) samples of 50% of Rhodes graduates and 70% of UFH graduates were drawn. The higher percentage sampled from UFH was due to the lower response rate among graduates from that institution. The end result is that about 25% of all graduates from each university participated in the study (the total population of graduates was 4927).

⁵Schooling quality is defined here in terms of school resources. Public schools are divided into quintiles according to their poverty ranking. In the regressions, the school poverty variable is constructed as a dummy variable where quintile 5 schools and elite privates schools are the reference category (0) and quintiles 1–4 are coded as ‘1’.

⁶There are a very small number of graduates from the coloured and Indian/Asian population groups from the two universities.

⁷Similarly, 20% of those who intended to study a Commerce degree but graduated in a different CESM switched to a degree in Humanities.

⁸In order to test for a possible bias associated with the method of data collection, both sets of estimations include a dummy control for whether the survey was completed online.

⁹The number of Indian/Asian and white graduates from Fort Hare who are unemployed is so low that they were excluded from the final two estimations in the table.

Additional information

Funding

The research was conducted under the Labour Market Intelligence Partnership, a research consortium led by the HSRC, South Africa, and funded by the Department of Higher Education and Training.