In what ways does access to undergraduate education have a transformative impact on people and societies? What conditions are required for this impact to occur? What are the pathways from an undergraduate education to the public good, including inclusive economic development? These questions have particular resonance in the South African higher education context, which is attempting to tackle the challenges of widening access and improving completion rates in in a system in which the segregations of the apartheid years are still apparent. Higher education is recognised in core legislation as having a distinctive and crucial role in building post-apartheid society. Undergraduate education is seen as central to addressing skills shortages in South Africa. It is also seen to yield significant social returns, including a consistent positive impact on societal institutions and the development of a range of capabilities that have public, as well as private, benefits. This book offers comprehensive contemporary evidence that allows for a fresh engagement with these pressing issues.

Outlining the major figures and proponents of numerous and varied philosophies—including empiricism, existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, systems theory, postmodernism, and feminism—this guidebook places a critical and creative eye towards many of society’s traditionally held beliefs. Providing readers with the tools to analyze life and to answer existential questions, this aide contextualizes each philosophy in modern terms to ensure accessibility and understanding. A tabulation of each philosophy’s merits and weaknesses is also included to help maximize learning.

Drawing on the South African case, this book looks at shifts in higher education around the world in the last two decades. In South Africa, calls for transformation have been heard in the university since the last days of apartheid. Similar claims for quality higher education to be made available to all have been made across the African continent. In spite of this, inequalities remain and many would argue that these have been exacerbated during the Covid pandemic. Understanding Higher Education responds to these calls by arguing for a social account of teaching and learning by contesting dominant understandings of students as decontextualised learners premised on the idea that the university is a meritocracy. This book tackles the issue of teaching and learning by looking both within and beyond the classroom. It looks at how higher education policies emerged from the notion of the knowledge economy in the newly democratic South Africa, and how national qualification frameworks and other processes brought the country more closely into conversation with the global order. The effects of this on staffing and curriculum structures are considered alongside a proposition for alternative ways of understanding the role of higher education in society.

Higher Education in South Africa should be of considerable interest to higher education researchers outside of South Africa, as well as within, for the general and comparative assessments it makes. The South African higher education researchers included within its covers have clearly engaged with research and writing from many parts of the world, which they have then applied to make sense of their own condition. - Malcolm Tight Lancaster University, UK

In this discussion of higher education studies in South Africa we attempt to illustrate how higher education studies in South Africa reflect both global and local trends and concerns, and how the publications by Eli Bitzer over the course of his involvement and dedication to the field for thirty years have contributed to our understanding of this field.

Reimagining South African Higher Education: Towards a Student-Centred Learning and Teaching Future provides progressive approaches and innovations that challenge readers to rethink student learning, engagement, support, and teaching. The book offers examples of evidence-informed and scholarly approaches to centring students through enhanced learning and teaching practices that are relevant to the South African context and those Global South contexts similar to South Africa.

"The idea of transformation in higher education underpins all policy documents, academic literature and on-going debates in South Africa. Transforming Universities in South Africa: Pathways to Higher Education Reform responds to the pressing need to comprehensively review the post-apartheid experience and assess where South Africa's higher education stands across the continent and globally, particularly within the country's efforts to overcome decades of socio-economic imbalances. It addresses the question of whether South Africa's transformation strategy from apartheid to democracy was simply a symbolic new flag-raising and new anthem singing exercise reflecting a transition akin to those limited decolonization projects elsewhere in the world, or whether something more fundamental was possible and was achieved with political and policy implications for other countries in Africa and globally. This volume's ultimate purpose is to provide a basis for imagining new futures in which South Africa higher education in the context of Africa and the global world takes centre stage"--

This innovative book addresses the leadership and management challenges of maximising the contribution of universities to civil society both locally and globally. It does this by developing a model of the civic university as an academic concept, drawing out practical lessons for university management on how to embed civic engagement in the heartland of the university. To this end, the contributors compare experiences and reports on a developmental process in eight institutions: University College London and Newcastle University in the UK, Amsterdam and Groningen Universities in the Netherlands, Aalto and Tampere Universities in Finland and Trinity College Dublin and Dublin Institute of Technology in Ireland. It will be of interest to academics of politics, public policy and management studies, as well as having relevance to policymakers in the field.

Higher Education in Africa. Crises, Reforms and Transformation