Foundation champions student achievement in South Africa

Considering the recent announcement that the Siyaphumelela Network is going to be extended, University World News went looking for more information about the funder behind the initiative.

The Kresge Foundation was founded in 1924 in Detroit in the United States by businessperson Sebastian S Kresge of Kmart fame. It is a private foundation working to “expand opportunities in America’s cities through grant-making and social investing”.

South Africa is the only country outside of the US where the foundation is active. It began funding South African higher education in 1989 and has, so far, invested US$40.2 million – initially in facilities and fundraising, switching to student success a decade ago, with some support also going to training and research.

Where did it start?

At this year’s annual Siyaphumelela Conference in Cape Town, Kresge Foundation President Rip Rapson told the story of how the idea for the initiative was born a decade ago.

Kresge had convened universities in South Africa in both formal meetings and dinners to determine how the foundation could best support higher education in the country. Vice-chancellors “made the case that, while universities had opened up after the end of apartheid, their success rates were unacceptably low”, Rapson said.

“They were unanimous in urging us to take on student success. We listened carefully, asked many questions, and came away persuaded.”

So, Kresge Education Program Managing Director Bill Moses went to work building a response.

Why higher education?

“We support higher education because we know it is critical to both a country’s economic development and social justice for individuals. Students are the heart and soul of our work – making sure that they are well served by their institutions,” Moses told University World News from Kresge headquarters in Troy, Michigan.

This resonates with the view of Professor Vincent Tinto of Syracuse University, a leading higher education theorist, who maintains that “access without support is not opportunity”. Addressing this disconnect is important because of the link between student success and social mobility, University World News reported on 24 August 2023.

“Graduation leads to gainful employment” but, in South Africa, post-secondary qualification attainment “continues to be strongly stratified by space and race”, Emma Whitelaw and Nicola Branson pointed out in an article about a presentation at the Siyaphumelela Conference by Professor Murray Leibbrandt of the University of Cape Town (UCT), a Siyaphumelela partner.

“This serves as a stark reminder of the urgency of prioritising student success,” they wrote, pointing out the complexity of the phenomenon, which encompasses inclusive access, constructive completion, and graduate prosperity.

Similar experiences

At the time that Moses was asked to build a response to the request by South African vice-chancellors, the Kresge Foundation already had experience with supporting student success initiatives in the US. These programmes focused on barriers experienced by low-income, first-generation, and underrepresented students in that country because, while more students were entering higher education there, and graduation rates had improved, racial, ethnic and socio-economic inequities persisted.

“A group of reformers at American community colleges, led by Achieving the Dream (ATD), had been experimenting with student-focused, data-driven approaches to address our own troubling graduation and throughput rates,” Rapson said in Cape Town earlier this year.

ATD, a non-profit organisation in the US working with community colleges in that country to “close achievement gaps and accelerate student success”, has served as a source of inspiration to Siyaphumelela.

Siyaphumelela adapted some of these approaches, tailoring the South African initiative to the unique needs and capacity of the country’s students and institutions.

Using data analytics

As mentioned by Rapson, a key factor in the student success initiatives supported by Kresge is putting data analytics to good use. Siyaphumelela encourages the rigorous analysis of student performance data and transforming this into comprehensible information for internal and external stakeholders.

“It’s about knowing your students, tracking their progress in real time, and linking that to student advising,” Jenny Glennie told University World News. She is the executive director of the South African Institute of Distance Education (SAIDE), which manages Siyaphumelela on behalf of Kresge.

Some of the innovations implemented through Siyaphumelela include using technology to provide early warnings that particular students might need support and ‘nudging’ them to stay on track. Siyaphumelela 3.0 will “prioritise data management and capacity-building, including how to analyse and convert data into actionable reforms and interventions to enhance student success”, the request-for-proposal document distributed on 27 November 2023 reads.

Partner institutions will be invited to participate online in know-your-data workshops, as well as sessions on the ethical use of data for student success.

Impact on success evident

According to Nasima Badsha, former CEO of the Cape Higher Education Consortium (CHEC), the impact of Siyaphumelela is evident at several levels.

“For individual students, especially first-generation students from poor communities, a university qualification is potentially life-changing for the individual and their families,” she writes. At an institutional level, the shift toward more equitable graduate outcomes is testament to participating universities’ stated commitment to student success as a social justice imperative.

In turn, this positively impacts on universities’ standing and reputation with the communities they serve, employers, and other key stakeholders. Also, the reduction in student attrition and drop-out contributes to greater efficiency and effectiveness and strengthens the pipeline of black students into postgraduate studies. Finally, improvement in graduate output contributes to universities getting more subsidy funding from the state.

Contribution is vital

“Funding for higher education has been declining in the past decade, and initiatives like student support have received less and less funding. So, Kresge’s contribution is critically important,” Professor Nthabiseng Ogude, dean of the Mamelodi Campus of the University of Pretoria , told University World News.

In 2009, when she was vice principal of teaching and learning at UP, she was invited to attend DREAM, the annual ATD conference where “thousands of practitioners come together to exchange evidence-based approaches to accelerating student success in a manner that champions equity and drives economic vibrancy”.

Kresge makes it possible for Siyaphumelela Network members to attend DREAM each year.

Professor Francois Strydom, the senior director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) at the University of the Free State (UFS) agrees that Kresge “plays a crucial role”. UFS is also one of the original Siyaphumelela partners, and the CTL has made important contributions to the network.

He says that Kresge has exposed “South African scholars and practitioners to colleagues around the globe that are working on similar challenges”.

“Kresge’s visionary leadership, especially through Bill Moses, has enabled hundreds of South African scholars and practitioners to think in different ways and develop national and international networks that have created opportunities for the poorest of the poor to have a better chance of earning a higher education degree and lift themselves, their families and communities out of poverty,” Strydom added.

SAIDE’s Glennie appreciates the fact that Kresge “doesn’t come with their own agenda but makes it their business to understand what the requirements are in a country like ours and listens to the various role-players”.

No quick fixes

With Siyaphumelela celebrating its 10th birthday next year, and the Kresge Foundation marking its centenary in 2024, the last word goes to Moses: “Philanthropy has the ability to take the long view. You don’t fix a problem that took decades or centuries to create overnight,” he said.