South Africa

Abstract

South Africa's higher education system has its roots in the nation's colonial and Apartheid past. This has shaped a deeply fragmented legacy upon which the building blocks of the new system must draw. In this presentation on the state of PhD studies in post-Apartheid South Africa, reference must be made to this legacy and its impact on the way that new thinking around doctoral studies has evolved. In the run-up to the first elections in 1994 a host of studies were initiated by what was then the national liberation movement relating to science and higher education systems (see Cloete 2002). The purpose of this was to position the government-in-waiting to develop a program of action on which it was to enter the elections and then to provide the basis for a substantial policy development process in the post-election period. These studies revealed many interesting and challenging issues of which, for the purpose of this paper, a few are listed here.