FUNDING CLIFF: Postgraduate funding crisis prompts launch of new bursary toolkit

A widening funding gap is leaving South Africa’s postgraduate students with fewer options to complete their studies. A new bursary toolkit aims to help funders design more effective support and improve student outcomes.

South Africa’s postgraduate students are falling through a widening funding gap, with the National Research Foundation (NRF) receiving a fraction of what the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) gets for undergraduates, a disparity described as a “national crisis” at the launch of a new sector-wide bursary toolkit on 20 August.

A webinar, hosted by the Independent Philanthropy Association of SA (Ipasa), brought together funders, university leaders and bursary practitioners to launch a toolkit, knowledge brief, roadmap and set of templates aimed at helping philanthropic funders design more effective higher education funding programmes.

Louise Sturrock, Ipasa’s programme manager, said the resources were developed after months of consultation because “many are navigating this landscape without a shared body of knowledge”, despite thousands of capable students being “held back every year, often by financial constraints alone”.

Professor Lynn Morris, Deputy-Vice Chancellor of Research and Innovation at the University of the Witwatersrand, told those in attendance that while NSFAS received “over R50-billion” annually for undergraduates, the National Research Foundation’s postgraduate funding budget was “only R1-billion” in 2024, and had roughly halved since 2017.

“There’s a real stark difference between what the government invests in undergraduate versus what they invest in postgraduate,” Morris said.

She added that the shortfall had created a “funding cliff” because students fully funded by NSFAS as undergraduates found almost no equivalent support once they moved into postgraduate study.

“We find that about 80% of the student debt... is in the postgrad space,” she said, since students carried undergraduate debt into their postgraduate enrolment.

Morris also flagged high attrition, saying about 25% of Wits’ PhD students never completed their degrees, and pointed to the Presidential PhD Programme, announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa in 2023, as an example of underfunded intent where only five programmes were approved nationally “at a considerably lower, in fact, about a tenfold lower funding level than was originally...