UCT’S admissions policy demotivates black pupils
VICE-CHANCELLOR Dr Max Price’s justification of UCT’S race-based admission policy of privileged black students is depressing.
“The legacy of different cultural capital and the effects of racial stereotypes, which are all direct consequences of our apartheid past” offers Dr Price an excuse for black pupils under-performing at expensive private and model C schools.
Blatant racism gift-wrapped in similar intellectual balderdash was ironically the tool used by Dr H Verwoerd to peddle “bantu education” and “separate development” commonly known as the apartheid Dr Price now seeks to blame.
Privileged black matrics from UCT’S feeder schools perform at an average of seven percentage points lower than white matrics because of UCT’S admission policy, not despite it, no matter how you try to spin it, Dr Price!
Depressingly, you will cause this figure to increase rather than decrease and add grist to the white racist mill that blacks are genetically stupid.
White parents will push their chil- dren to higher levels, forced by your university entrance qualifications, leaving black students eating their dust.
Even worse, it will take an entire new intake of pupils to university exemption level to flush your experiment down the drain where it belongs.
My buddies and I completed school and tertiary education to become engi- neers by doing the bare minimum of work to pass in order to maximise our “jolling” time, mostly at the Pig and Whistle.
If anyone offered us a lower pass rate we would have targeted just one percent higher with the one who studied the least to achieve this as our role model.
Are you so out of touch with reality, Dr Price, as to believe your privileged black students are not the same today?
Dr Max Price replies: John Buchanan argues that black students work less hard because they believe they can get into the University of Cape Town with lower marks.
This conclusion is based, it seems, on his own experience as an engineering student, where the aim was to work no harder than the minimum required to achieve the goal – that is, a bare pass. While I cannot dispute Mr Buchanan’s attitude to work and competition, he has no evidence that this is indeed the explanation for poorer marks among black students.
Firstly, no student can predict accurately what mark they will eventually get and whether, in the competition among applicants on the day, a given mark will be adequate to secure admission.
It would be a very high risk and foolish strategy to aim for a lower mark on those grounds.
I should emphasise that many black students from private schools do not succeed in gaining admission to competitive programmes at UCT. More importantly, in contrast to Mr Buchanan's anecdotal evidence, my explanations for the differences in marks between black and white relatively privileged students are based on a wealth of scientific literature on how stereotype expectations affect performance, on how various early childhood experiences influence later school performance, on the importance of parental education, and the other external determinants.
It is only fair that the admissions policy should recognise that the playing fields are not yet level.