YOU are wrong — free tertiary education does not increase inequality. Since Blade Nzimande’s reckless announcement that a fees increase must be decided by the universities themselves, and the protests that followed, a stream of authors argued in this newspaper that free tertiary education for all would be fiscally irresponsible and increase inequality.The authors make the implicit assumption that the money necessary for free tertiary education would have to be cut from other government expenditures, most noteworthy expenditures for the poor. The estimates how much is needed for free tertiary education vary a bit, but a safe number is R50bn a year. This is roughly how much student fees contribute to university budgets across SA. The number sounds large, but it needs to be put into perspective. The total South African tax revenue, personal income tax, company income tax and value-added tax sums up to roughly R1,000bn. If one would want to finance free tertiary education solely through...
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