Taking a look at the numbers, Quartz reports that there was a “higher proportion of black students successfully graduating from South Africa’s universities during apartheid than there is today”.

Yup.

Although there are more black students enrolled today than during apartheid, in 1975 15% of black students successfully graduated, while in 2016 that figure dropped to 5%.

The data, released by South Africa’s statistician general Pali Lehohla, showed how, in contrast, the number of white graduates had increased slightly during the same period.

That 5% today translates to a much higher number of students, but the data “highlights one of the hot button issues in South African higher education today – the lack of funding opportunities available to black students”:

It is this lack of funding that has driven the mass protests of the Fees Must Fall movement over the last two years.

During apartheid, black students had opportunities to travel abroad on fully funded scholarships – many of them did so in political exile. There were also segregated universities, which have since been absorbed into other former white-only schools, or neglected.

And you wonder why the protests continued yesterday:

On Oct. 25, students from the University of Cape Town and Cape Peninsula University of Technology planned to march to parliament, where South Africa’s recently appointed finance minister delivered first mid-term budget speech.

Demanding that the president release a long-awaited report on free education, the march was meant to be a continuation of the landmark Fees Must Fall protests. The march was cancelled at the eleventh hour after student leaders said they could not guarantee the safety of protesters after police and city officials allegedly “promised to retaliate.”

Some video from yesterday:

While the number of black students has increased and, on average, young black South Africans have a higher level of education than previous generations, endemic inequalities still exist in every aspect of society.

These make it so, so difficult for many black South Africans to get from first year to graduation:

Post-apartheid South Africa’s education system has perpetuated the racial and class inequalities of the previous regime. The majority of working class black students come from poorly-resourced schools and are ill-equipped to make the university grade. They get lost in a public education system equipped to educate 450,000 undergraduates, but which is currently hosting nearly a million.

Jacob Zuma’s government has clashed with the largest student protest movement in 2015 and again in 2016 over the state’s failure to make good on the promise of free education.

Our government past and present can be held accountable for many failures, and failure to provide basic education is up there with the worst of them.

[source:qz]