Figure 19: Demographic shift in young graduate (<35 years) profiles by race and gender between 2008 and 2020

Public resources for school education have been reallocated to the extent that the racial and rich-poor gaps in public spending per child have largely been eliminated, although wealthier urban schools still have more highly qualified teachers, and therefore better-remunerated teachers, and fee-paying schools can supplement public resources through their school fees. Resource shifts have not eliminated infrastructural backlogs in education, but in most cases, they have also not fundamentally changed learning outcomes, because of weak conversion of resources to learning outcomes in much of the school system. In contrast to the above concerns, signs of quality improvement and consequent inequality reduction do exist. For example, analysis of matric performance for 2002, 2009 and 2016 show that the number of non-White students attaining a level of mathematics performance that would allow entry into engineering at university increased by 65%. These improvements occurred inter alia through the expansion of good mathematics performance across rural schools.26

6.3 Tertiary Education

Despite the challenges mentioned above, higher education enrolment and completion has increased in the post-apartheid period, as already shown in some of the figures above. Figure 19 also shows the distribution of young graduates (degrees) by race, indicating improvement in this overall picture to align more closely with population demographics.

Figure 19: Demographic shift in young graduate (<35 years) profiles by race and gender between 2008 and 2020 Source: QLFS 2008 Q1-Q4 and 2020 Q1-Q427 (data averaged within each year)

In 2019, approximately 1.15 million students were enrolled in universities (953,000 public and 197,000 private), 880,000 in TVET colleges (710,000 public and 170,000 private), and 300,000 in community education and training centres.30

6.4 How does education link to employment and income?

Figure 20 below shows that of the 6.7 million unemployed persons at the end of 2019, 56% had education levels below matric, followed by those with matric at 34.7%. Only 1.9% of the unemployed persons were graduates, while 6.8% had other tertiary qualifications as their highest level of education. This suggests that lower levels of education are associated with higher levels of unemployment.