Low-Income Students, Human Development and Higher Education in South Africa

This book explores
learning outcomes for low-income rural and township youth at five South
African universities. The book is framed as a contribution to southern
and Africa-centred scholarship, adapting Amartya Sen’s capability
approach and a framework of key concepts: capabilities, functionings,
context, conversion factors, poverty and agency to investigate
opportunities and obstacles to achieved student outcomes. This approach
allows a reimagining of ‘inclusive learning outcomes’ to encompass the
multi-dimensional value of a university education and a plurality of
valued cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes for students from low-income
backgrounds whose experiences are strongly shaped by hardship.

Based
on capability theorising and student voices, the book proposes for
policy and practice a set of contextual higher education capability
domains and corresponding functionings orientated to more justice and
more equality for each person to have the opportunities to be and to do
what they have reason to value. The book concludes that sufficient
material resources are necessary to get into university and flourish
while there; the benefits of a university education should be rich and
multi-dimensional so that they can result in functionings in all areas
of life as well as work and future study; the inequalities and exclusion
of the labour market and pathways to further study must be addressed by
wider economic and social policies for ‘inclusive learning outcomes’ to
be meaningful; and that universities ought to be doing more to enable
black working-class students to participate and succeed.

Low-Income Students, Human Development and Higher Education in South Africa makes
an original contribution to capabilitarian scholarship: conceptually in
theorising a South-based multi-dimensional student well-being higher
education matrix and a rich reconceptualisation of learning outcomes, as
well as empirically by conducting rigorous, longitudinal in-depth
mixed-methods research on students’ lives and experiences in higher
education in South Africa. The audience for the book includes higher
education researchers, international capabilitarian scholars,
practitioners and policy-makers.