Universities in South Africa during apartheid reflected the racialised politics of the period. This gave rise to divisive descriptors such as "historically white/black"; "English/Afrikaans-speaking" institutions and "Bantustan'' universities. These descriptors signal a hierarchy of social status and state funding. We start…

Population censuses record considerable volumes of personal information, which when aggregated and tabulated provide significant insights into national societies. South African censuses have recorded levels of educational attainment since their inception in the mid-nineteenth century, initially measuring literacy and later the level of education…

A key factor in providing quality education is the main language of instruction (M-LoI). This creates a challenging situation for education policymakers in post-colonial multilingual countries such as South Africa. Language-in-education policies must valorise indigenous languages and redress their exclusion in past education systems while ensuring…

Although studies claim increases in underrepresented populations choosing STEM majors, barriers to retention, and higher education degree completion in STEM still exist. This study examined efforts of a prominent technical university to attract and retain urban high school graduates through a tuition scholarship program. We sought to determine the…

This paper reviews the existing literature to discuss how critical race theory has been applied as a theoretical framework to higher educational research in the United States and what its contributions are. To provide necessary context, I will discuss race and racism in the United States, the background of US higher education in relation to race,…

Twenty-two years after apartheid South African higher education is still struggling with challenges around access, success and transformation. Stellenbosch University (SU), as a historically white university, is striving to become significantly better and different in terms of relevance and active role-playing. SU wants to prepare students to…

This paper provides a history of academic development by examining how a South African institution coped with the potent social forces confronting it before the collapse of apartheid. Theoretically, it draws on the framework of Pierre Bourdieu and engages with a paper written a decade ago by Naidoo, who also used Bourdieu to understand…

The post-apartheid higher education transformation project is faced with the challenge of recruiting and retaining black academics and other senior staff. But when we shift the focus from participation rates to equality-inequality within historically white universities (HWUs), then the discourse changes from demographic equity and redress to…

The evolution of South African universities continues to be shaped by both apartheid and more recent post-apartheid policies. Yet the South African university system is mainly an elite, low participation and high attrition system, offering a medium quality education. Moreover, there is uneven attention to the opportunities that…

Drawing on existing literature and student ethnographic projects, this article examines Asian American undergraduates' overwhelming focus on individual racial identity and practices of racial segregation in their ethnographic research about the University of Illinois. The author examines how such racial segregation is described and analysed as a…

In this study we investigate Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) high school graduates' academic performance in the first year of college and test whether their exposure to racial segregation in high school at both the school and classroom levels affected their college freshman grade point averages. Utilizing administrative data from the Roots of…

In this article, Uma M. Jayakumar investigates the cumulative impact of experiences with segregation or racial diversity prior to and during college on colorblind ideological orientation among white adults. An analysis of longitudinal data spanning ten years reveals that, for whites from segregated and diverse childhood neighborhoods, some…

In 2014, through the University of the Free State's (UFS) Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice (IRSJ), three South African universities partnered to collaborate on the pilot phase of a research project focused on understanding whether the Arts could enable social cohesion, as the 2012 National Development Plan (2030) had promoted. All…

Objective: This study illustrates how external factors of urban and suburban racializations contribute to criminalization and surveillance of an urban community college campus and bus shelters surrounding it. Method: A postcolonial geographic research design is used to analyze geographic and qualitative data. Results: Results show that an urban…

Transformation in higher education in South Africa over the last 20 years has been strongly shaped by post-apartheid pressures. Recent research shows that South Africa's current higher education system can be described as medium knowledge-producing and differentiated, with low participation and high attrition. In the decade following 1994, both…