When the development of South Africa is discussed, the state of the country’s education system is often the elephant in the room.
Its poor quality is blamed for the low skills, rampant youth unemployment and the sluggish progress of racial transformation in the workplace, with the legacy of the apartheid-era Bantu education program (racial segregation within educational institutions) still casting a cloud over the country.
Yet its top universities, including Wits, Cape Town and Stellenbosch, have stood out as able to hold their own at an international level. Indeed, South Africa boasts that it was the first country outside the United States to offer an MBA, after the Graduate School of Management at the University of Pretoria was established in 1949.
However, a controversial debate about the status of MBAs is causing uncertainty and consternation among the country’s business schools at a time when international institutions are showing increasing interest in Africa. China’s Ceibs Business School, for example, opened a campus in Accra, Ghana, in 2009.
At the core of the issue is a proposal by South Africa’s Council on Higher Education (CHE) to categorize the MBA in the same bracket as a postgraduate diploma rather than as a masters degree. The move, which would also effect the state subsidies business schools receive, comes in the wake of a series of reviews of the country’s higher education sector in recent years.
From the CHE’s perspective, the proposal is about ensuring that all masters qualifications are treated equally in terms of entry requirements. Currently, masters applicants require an honours degree or postgraduate degree. But the MBA has no such barriers to entry. Instead it is professional experience that is considered an important factor.
The business schools insist that their entry processes are already rigorous and worry that by placing the MBA a notch below a masters and classifying it in the same category as a postgraduate diploma, the qualification will be perceived to be downgraded, with the risk of damaging the standing of the South African MBA.
“I think it’s a gamble to start saying we are going to downgrade,” says Wendy Ngoma, head of Wits Business School. “It will have negative implications for schools that are competing at high levels. I can’t offer two diplomas, I already have a diploma that is preparing students to go on to an MBA.”
She says South African schools, the most established in sub-Saharan Africa, are already competing with wealthier international schools offering scholarships to attract the continent’s top talent, and worries that categorizing the MBA at the level of postgraduate diploma would hurt the country’s competitiveness.
Another concern, Prof. Ngoma says, is the potential impact it could have on Wits’ links with international schools through the Partnership in International Management, a program that facilitates student exchanges between member universities.
“When they [international universities] send their students here, they are not sending them to come and do diplomas,” she says.
The roots of the debate can be traced back to 2005, when the Higher Education Qualifications Framework conducted a review of MBAs. It recommended that the MBA be regarded as a masters degree, with a research component equivalent to a third of the total number of credits that constitute a masters degree. When the HEQF was promulgated in 2008, the MBA was put at the level of a masters, but it was only to be implemented this year.
Then in 2010 the CHE announced its own review of the HEQF to address a “range of identified gaps and inconsistencies,” according to Ahmed Essop, CHE’s chief executive.
A key issue for the CHE was to create an environment that would lead to universities offering a wider array of professional masters that would have a “more flexible” research component.
