On different pages in the differentiation debate

By Johan Muller. Research in South Africa over the past eight years has clustered universities into groups based on performance indicators. It has made visible long-term stability and shorter-term dynamism in the higher education system, and contributed to the debate on differentiation. The Centre for Higher Education Transformation (CHET) has been a vigorous proponent and sponsor of the ‘differentiation debate’ in South African higher education. The latest instalment was a seminar held on 24 January 2013 in Cape Town. CHET’s signal contribution to the debate has been to construct a set of performance indicators, initially based largely on research and research-related indicators, which made visible for the first time a distribution of the country’s universities, revealing distinct clusters of institutions. Read more...