By Werner Abrahams, CEO of ISFAP
Since the #FeesMustFall movement, South Africa has rightly been focused on expanding access to higher education. We have debated fees, funding models and the design of financial aid. We have marched, legislated and negotiated and as a result, more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are entering universities and TVET colleges than ever before.
But if we are honest, access is only half the battle. A right that exists only at the point of entry is a hollow one. If education is truly a human right, then our focus must extend beyond opening the door, it must include the ability to stay, to succeed, and to graduate.
Too many of our young people start, but never finish.
Across the system, we see a stubborn reality: significant numbers of students, particularly from poor and “missing middle” households, are dropping out before completing their qualifications. The reasons are complex, but they are not mysterious.
They include financial pressures, academic under-preparedness, mental health challenges, lack of social support, and a higher education environment that often feels alien and unforgiving to first-generation students.
The national conversation tends to treat success as an individual responsibility and access as a collective responsibility. I would argue that this is the wrong way around. If we accept that education is a human right and a public good, then completion – not just admission – must be a shared obligation of government, institutions, the private sector and civil society.
Financing is the most obvious starting point. A student who enters with a bursary for fees alone but has no support for accommodation, transport, food or learning materials is technically “in the system” – but constantly at risk of falling out of it. Likewise, a student whose funding is uncertain from year to year lives with a permanent anxiety that undermines concentration, performance and wellbeing.
We must shift from “getting you in this year” to “walking with you until you graduate”.
This is why comprehensive funding models matter. At ISFAP, we focus on the “missing middle” – families who earn too much to qualify for full state support, but too little to afford the true cost of higher education and our model deliberately goes beyond tuition. It includes accommodation, living allowances and, crucially, structured wrap‑around support: academic mentoring, psychosocial services, life skills and career guidance.
We have learned something important: money alone is necessary, but not sufficient. A student who arrives under-prepared for the academic demands of university, who is far from home, possibly the first in their family to study, navigating complex institutions and expectations, needs more than a fee payment. They need orientation, belonging, guidance and encouragement. They need people and systems that assume their success, not their failure.
If we want higher graduation rates, we must design for success, rather than hope for it.
This requires three mindset shifts.
First, supporting a student through to graduation is not an act of benevolence; it is a strategic investment in the skills base, productivity and social stability of our country. Every graduate we produce is a future taxpayer, innovator, professional or community leader. The returns, both financial and social, are significant.
Second, we often count how many students we fund, how much is disbursed, or how many access programmes we run. These metrics matter, however they are not the end goal. The measure of our success should be completion rates, employability and long‑term wellbeing. Public and private funders alike should be asking: how many of the students we support cross the finish line?
Third, Government cannot do this alone, universities cannot do it alone, nor can the private sector or NGOs. We need genuine partnerships that align resources, data and expertise around a common goal: not just more enrolments, but more graduates from historically excluded communities.
This means re‑examining outdated income thresholds, modernising means testing to reflect real household pressures, and scaling blended funding models where government, business and philanthropy combine forces. It also means insisting that funding includes built‑in academic and psychosocial support as a core component of what it takes to realise the right to education.
Ultimately, when we say that education is a human right, we must finish the sentence: it is the right to access, to participate fully, and to graduate with dignity.
The young people entering our lecture halls today carry their own aspirations as well as the hopes of families, communities and a country in urgent need of skills and opportunity. We owe it to them – and to ourselves – to ensure that the promise we make at registration is kept at graduation.
Moving from access to graduation is not a luxury. It is the next, necessary chapter in making the right to education real in South Africa.