• Youth

Academic transformation from secondary to tertiary education

Desiree Gases

The leaking of 32 examination papers involving 10 grade 11 and 12 subjects will cause further disruptions to a system which is already experiencing challenges due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The leak led to the disruption of national examinations, which were rewritten early this year, and led to the early closure of schools and late registration to tertiary institutions. The ministry of information and communication technology hosted an information center online, where they dissected the academic transformation from secondary to tertiary education.

The academic calendar of institutions like Namibian University of Science and Technology (NUST) were already approved last year but re-strategized to accommodate the learners with delayed results, Wynand Diergaardt, the acting registrar for NUST, said.

“We have a special registration for the learners from the 1 to 11 March. We will also keep our late applications open until the end of February,” added Diergaardt.

Meanwhile, the University of Namibia (Unam) already predicted late registration, so they made provision in their calendar.

“We will not be leaving the learners out in the cold, and we will be waiting for them as soon as the results come out,” said professor Erica Maass, the Unam registrar.

However, the grade 12 legacy results are still being made provision for and the institution will wait for those learners.

The International University of Management (IUM) has the same system in place for the learners awaiting their results.

“Students who are already admitted and waiting for their results are sort of reserved, therefore they will not be disadvantaged,” said Aquilinus Nashilundo, the IUM registrar said. A specific date for registration still needs to be put in place and communicated and for those who haven’t applied and are still waiting to apply, application has been extended to the end of February.

A lot of learners have been concerned about getting into tertiary institutions with their results being delayed, but most - if not all - Namibian institutions have made provision for special registration and application. Annual registration fees can sometimes be a burden on parents and students considering the fact that the past two years have taken a financial toll on everyone, but the Namibia Students Financial Assistance Fund (NSFAF) is always there to assist. In that regard, institutions have also made provision.

The NSFAF application process has already started on the 27 January, and will run until the end of March. “We have about 1 900 students who have applied, Olavi Hamwele, the chief human capital and corporate affairs officer at NSFAF, said. “We have reached out to local institutions to make an arrangement regarding the registration process and the current arrangement is the students who will register with an acknowledgment letter from NSFAF will be getting a reduced registration fee.”

At IUM, students who are NSFAF funded do not pay registration fees. However, in the past, IUM would ask non-NSFAF students for a deposit fee as well as the registration fee, but now they only ask for the registration fee and the deposit is payable later in the year. At Unam, students with bursaries don’t have to pay registration fees depending on the conditions of the particular sponsorship/bursary.

“The biggest problem is the non-bursary holders and that is why we divided the tuition fees in instalments of 25% so the non-bursary holders still have to pay 25% of their tuition fees during registration,” Maass added.