The Historically High Cost of Tertiary Education in South Africa

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Following the lead of #WitsFeesMustFall the previous week, a group of concerned students, organised under #StelliesFeesMustFall, occupied an administration building on the Monday and attempted to shut down campus throughout the week to protest against a proposed fee hike of 11.5%. Hours before Zuma would announce the zero fee increase on the Friday, Stellenbosch University rector and vice-chancellor Wim de Villiers would do the same at a mass meeting at the intersection of Merriman and Van Ryneveld streets.

2 For Australia, see: http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20140520104403200; for Brazil, see: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/07/youth-protests-dilma-rousseff-pt/; for Germany, see: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/opinion/abolishing-tuition-fees-lessons-from-germany/2017085.article; for the Netherlands, see: http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/mar/17/dutch-student-protests-ignite-movement-against-management-of-universities; for the United Kingdom, see: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/nov/19/student-protest-tuition-fees-scuffles-police.

3 We use 2005 South African rand as the base year because a more recent base year is not consistently used across all indicators.

4 This is a lower-bound estimate. Using a different consumer price index deflator, we find that this factor increases to 3.2.