[YCLSA Discussion] Stop garnishing former students

[Dominic Tweedie]

Stop garnishing former students     Caiphus Kgosana, Sunday Independent, Johannesburg, 7 March 2010   POOR students should be given access to free tertiary education and race should be scrapped as a tool to identify those in need.   Beneficiaries of student loans who have been blacklisted by the National Student Financial Aid Scheme for failure to repay the loans should have their names taken off credit bureau blacklists.   The debiting of salaries of former student loan beneficiaries through garnishee orders to force them to repay has been declared unconstitutional and should be stopped.   These are some of the recommendations of an expert panel appointed by Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande to review the functioning of the state-funded financial aid scheme for students at colleges and universities.   Independent Newspapers has a copy of the report compiled by the review panel, chaired by Professor Marcus Balintulo. The report is expected to be published in the next two weeks.   If its recommendations are accepted, the higher education landscape could see radical changes.   This comes in a week that the SA Students' Congress (Sasco) tried to shut down nine of the country's major universities in protest against excessive tuition fees and the exclusion of students who fail to pay. Sasco is demanding free education.   The report recommends that the government should draw up policy that would give effect to providing free higher education for poor students.   "The review committee recommends a higher education student financial aid model that progressively provides free higher education to undergraduate level students from poor and working-class communities."   Students from lower-middle-income families should be provided "student loans on favourable terms", the report recommends.   A move towards free university study for poor students was one of the ANC's resolutions at its Polokwane conference in 2007.   It is likely to go down well with the ruling party, its alliance partners and Sasco.   The report also calls on the government to substantially increase funding of higher education and the financial aid scheme to increase the number of poor students in higher education institutions.   The fund was allocated R2.1 billion in this financial year, which will rise to R2.7bn next year.   The panel has suggested that race be removed as a means of identifying a student's financial needs, saying the race-based formula is discriminatory.   "Patently this is wrong, particularly so in view of the... emergence of a black middle and upper class and the spreading of seriously low levels of poverty among white students as equity and redress policies are beginning to show results," the report says.   It said this should be replaced by a class-based formula.   From: http://www.sundayindependent.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=5380487     -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to yclsa-eom-forum@googlegroups.com or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email yclsa-eom-forum-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): yclsa-eom-forum-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com .