Equity, access and success in higher education in times of disruption: Contemporary and future imaginaries

Abstract

Since democracy in 1994, equity, access to and success in higher education have constituted a triple cocktail of transformational imperatives in higher education. Equity was seen as the canvass on which narratives of confronting the legacies of the apartheid policies in education were to be written. While there have been notable increases in access, the other side of the coin which represents student success has not shown comparable improvement. (Robinson and Gahagan 2010). This has remained a challenge especially forstudents from poor socioeconomic backgrounds and also those enrolled in historically black universities in South Africa (Bazana and Mogotsi 2017). Themane and Mabasa (2022) argue that these issues of equity access and success have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the argument has also been raised by a number of articles for this issue. For good academic, political and administrative reasons, universities in the country have been focused on saving the academic year and took a collective though difficult decision of abandoning the tried and tested face-to-face modalities of university instruction and adopted online teaching and learning.