4.3 Impact of institutional factors on students
4.3.2 Access to financial resources: “Will I be here next year?”
Entry into higher education for students from socio-economically deprived backgrounds provides an opportunity for them to change their economic situation at a personal and family levels. Financial obstacles were the most common factors that hindered participants’ access to learning in higher education. The views shared by the participants suggests that access to money was unequivocally the main barrier to academic success, as reflected in the excerpts below:
Summer: “My first year at university was harder because I didn't have money to buy everything’s that I needed. I don’t have funding such as NSFAS in my first
74
year, in other times I would receive R600 from my parents to buy groceries such as food and cosmetics and need to add clothes. That money is too small to buy toiletries and enough food but I was able to manage. What I did since the money was not enough to buy everything, I talked to my roommate about buying grocery together and she agreed. That helped a lot because I was able to buy toiletries and have money to buy bread for the whole month”.
Ben: “One thing that I knew was that there was no money back home I knew there was no way my mother was going to pay for my studies in South Africa and my uncle is a student with no job. After my first year I remember I was owing R26 000 and I had two certificates in merits. I went to different organization such as Gift of Givers, Catholic Church in PMB. It was unsuccessful and no one was willing to help. I was feeling down and I questioned myself why did I come to this country? Will I be there next year? It was never granted, throughout me degree I lived in fear will I be able to pay off the debt because it was always increasing. I remember my uncle going the next morning to the school of physic and chemistry and he was asking to see the Dean. My uncle told the Dean that I don’t have money to register and the Dean check the system and told my uncle I have received a scholarship worth R20 000 because I did well in my first year”.
The stories told by the participants revealed that access to financial resources is one of the key criteria for entrance to higher education institutions, but also one of the key hindrances to managing life at university. When Summer entered the university field, she did not have NSFAS funding. As result, she struggled to provide herself with basic needs, such as food and toiletries. Her mother, who is a single-parent and unemployed, could afford to give her R600 that she would use to buy these essentials. Thus, whatever she received from her mother was not “enough for me to buy all those things – toiletries”. According to Walker and Mathebula (2020), low-income students do not always have families who can provide them with the support required to succeed at university. These students are often exposed to hardship and stress arising from getting into university and not having what is required to navigate life. When this happens, students often feel deserted and stranded in these struggles for survival, as they often have no cover from their families, who are often struggling for cover themselves. For the students who participated in this study, this was the biggest
75
inequality they had ever faced, it is historical, contextual and intergenerational – a case for being in a situation that is none of your creation.
However, Summer’s narrative suggests a promising semblance of initiative and a sense of agency. For instance, Summer devised a strategy to overcome her financial challenges by collaborating with her fellow roommate to share expenses. This relationship was fruitful and enabled her some space to negotiate the financial crisis that she was experiencing in her life.
Summer, for instance, successfully negotiated her struggle of not affording basic needs”.
This is in line with Bourdieu (1986) understanding of social capital. For Summer, establishing a supportive relationship with her roommate enabled them to manage their money in a manner that enabled them to “buy toiletries… bread for the whole month”.
Summer learned that to navigate university space, she needed friends, which was her applying her agency to navigate her situation. Forming such relationships, although not an ideal one, may be useful and valuable for students who may be in a similar situation to that of Summer, as a means to university life (Walker & Mathebula, 2020).
Ben was from a well-educated and successful family, but he did not receive financial support from them. Further, he states that “there was no money back home.” This is one of the reasons he was chosen as a participant for this study. Ben was faced with problems of not having money to pay his first-year debt. He could not rely on his mother, who was single, and his uncle who was also “… a student with no job…”. Despite receiving “two certificates in merits” for his modules, Ben could not obtain funding from outside organisations. He reports that he had tried the “Gift of Givers and the Catholic Church”, all in vain. This suggests that despite having the required academic capital of two merit certificates, this was not sufficient to resolve Ben’s challenge of access to economic capital, which threatened his cultural capital in respect of his university studies.
Furthermore, Ben did not have access economic capital (money) to pay the outstanding debt, which caused him to start questioning himself on his reasons for coming to “this country [South Africa]”, in which he constantly “lived in fear will I be there next year”. According to Soria et al. (2014), working class students may be stunned by the financial challenges they would experience after gaining entry at a university, and may often not sufficiently resources or capital to face the situation. In other words, what they believed was a breakthrough could be followed by regret. For instance, Summer and Ben’s financial troubles, instead of getting
76
better, were exacerbated by the fact that they could not receive funding from the NSFAS.
Thus, they experienced a difficult transition from school to higher education. Ben’s situation illustrates the fact that being admitted to university may not necessarily translate to access to higher education for students from socio-economically deprived sections of society.
According to Masutha (2020), economic capital is passed down from one generation to the next, and Ben, in his situation, could not access wealth that is not there. As such, he began to question the possibility of a better future, if he cannot pay off his historical debt. However, his academic performance and the cultural resources, through the intervention by his uncle allowed him to access institutional resources in the form of a scholarship. Waterfield et al.
(2019) have pointed out that successful black students, who come from poor backgrounds, may not have sufficient economic capital immediately when they enter university, but may gradually build this as they become recipients of bursaries and scholarship because of their academic achievements. This suggests that universities and governments must make bursary and scholarship opportunities available for this category of students.