Supply and demand in south africa

The advent of democracy in 1994 and the promulgation of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa signaled the end of restricted access to higher education on legal grounds. The African National Congress (ANC) then issued a comprehensive policy framework for education and training. This framework addresses the enormity of the apartheid legacy of education and provides a coherent policy statement albeit with contradictory tensions in terms of some of the proposed goals. Most notably, it advocated the pursuit of equity and access as being of paramount importance, and signaled quite clearly that the adverse effects of apartheid in the realm of education need to be addressed. The analysis undertaken in this chapter demonstrates that the enormity of the task at hand, the resources required to redress past inequities, and the deeply entrenched nature of the racially-divided educational system were grossly underestimated by the architects of the new policy framework (and vision) for the sector, including the critically important higher education subsector.