• Restructuring higher education in South Africa was mooted in the early 2000s. CDE organised a high-level debate on what such institutional reconfiguration would seek to achieve and what it should look like.
  • The goal was to reduce the number of institutions from 36 to 21 to concentrate capacity in leadership, management, teaching, and research.
  • CDE asked how success in institutional reconfiguration should be measured.
  • Business’s view was that the mark of a good educational system was an economy growing in a sustainable way, with rising fixed investment and job creation rather than job destruction.