Measures of redress: Defining disadvantage in a university access programme

Creating alternative avenues to higher education for learners from disadvantaged educational contexts is one of several official redress objectives for South African universities attempting to rectify the injustices of apartheid. Yet how disadvantage is to be defined in a nation characterised by profound economic inequalities and the legacy of racialised political domination is not straightforward. This article presents a case study that documents the effects of two definitions of disadvantage — one racial, the other economic — informing the admissions policies of a university access programme operational on two campuses. It compares respective student cohorts by three sets of variables affecting access to higher education: educational background, household resources, and personal difficulties experienced during the matric year. The study suggests that economic and racial definitions of disadvantage produce student profiles with different levels of educational and socio-economic disadvantage, yet parallels in the frequencies of personal difficulties reported by respective groups suggests that new conceptions of disadvantage (accounting for the effects of HIV/AIDS on schooling) merit further investigation. I argue that targeted disadvantaged populations for access to higher education should be identified without evoking and entrenching the anachronistic language of race.