By: Sue Blaine - Businessday.co.za
About 320000 (R2,3m) of a three-year 6,7m programme to strengthen 12 of SA’s rural further education and training (FET) colleges would be used for labour market research to better align college education with market needs, Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande said yesterday.
Nzimande was launching a new partnership between the US diplomatic mission to SA, the government and the US Agency for International Development, aimed at strengthening the academic programmes, skills development training and student support offered by the 12 selected colleges in Limpopo, Mpumalanga and the Northern Cape.
The need for better alignment between labour market needs and what is taught at FET colleges has been a constant refrain from education specialists for several years.
An important part of the collaboration, which would be implemented by the American Council on Education and American Association of Community Colleges, would be the improvement of student support services at the 12 FET colleges.
This would help students make the “correct” programme choices, and ensure they were given suitable learning materials, Nzimande said.
The government had spent R1,9bn in the three years ending March on upgrading SA’s 50 public FET colleges, including introducing the first batch of overhauled curricula, Nzimande said.
Nzimande has promised to increase FET enrolment from about 400000 to 1-million by 2015, but concerns about the quality of the colleges remain.
More than a third of the students who wrote the new curricula failed their examinations last year.
This was the second year running that more than a third of such students had failed.