Probe Into The Mergers Of Higher Education Institutions In South Africa

Mergers of higher education institutions is a trend of higher education reform world wide since the mid of 20^th century. It has internal connections with those factors that have great influence on the outcome and development of modern higher education, such as globalization, internationalization of higher education, massification of higher education, new managerism and etc. And it is also closely inter-related to specific status, tradition and environment for the development of higher education in respective countries. Mergers have rebuilt the landscapes of higher education systems in many countries. However, whether it is proper to undertake mergers as a measure of reform, and how to undertake mergers effectively is still a heated disputed topic.The establishment of the new government in 1994 turns over a new page in the history of South Africa. The main theme of post-apartheid South Africa is to achieve equity and development goal in every aspect of society. However, the inherited higher education system is characterized with low efficiency as a whole entity, polarization in advantaged institutions/groups and disadvantaged institutions/groups, the unbalanced development in the parallel university track and technikon track, and the lack of responsiveness to the need of social economic development. Obviously, the old system can hardly satisfy the need of building a democratic new South Africa. After the exploration of higher education reform since the mid of 1990s, at the turn of the new century, historically, South Africa took mergers of higher education institutions as one of the most important measures to success.Through observation in the field, document reading and analysis, the paper probes into the mergers of higher education institutions in South Africa in a historical perspective. It examines the mergers of higher education institutions in South Africa in the context of mergers everywhere in the world, and refers to the unique history and reality of South Africa and its development and transformation of higher education. It tries to reveal the motivation and reasons beneath the surface, review the development of related theories and policies, follow the implementation, summarize the achievements, and analyze the experiences. Based on the examination of the mergers of higher education institutions in South Africa, it is hoped to provide us with a key to understand the higher education transformation and its future course of development in South Africa, and also provide us with an outside angle of view to evaluate and examine the merger cases in our country.The main body of this paper covers five aspects,Part 1, "the history and reality of higher education in South Africa", covers three aspects, general information about South Africa, higher education in apartheid South Africa, and review of higher education reform in post-apartheid South Africa. This chapter is about the historical and environmental basis for the mergers in South Africa higher education system.Part2, "the analysis of the motivation and reasons for the mergers", analyses the issue discussed from two aspects, external and internal. Internationalization of higher education system, new managerism, the demand on higher education development by the social economy of South Africa, and the problems exists in the pre-merger reform stages in higher education system are all taken into account.Part 3, "the process and the obstacles of the mergers", follows the whole process of mergers with the clue of policy development and policy implementation of mergers, and also examines the obstacles in the process of merger implementation.Part 4, "the achievements of mergers", discusses five aspects of positive changes emerge after the implementation of mergers.Part 5, "the experience of the mergers in South Africa", summarized four points that learned from the South African experience, naming as "full scale investigation and repeatedly reasoning", "government driven and improve the occasion", "merger within same or near geographic location and keep those world class institutions less impacted", "merger follow specific types and deep involvement and integration required".Part 6, "the lessons learned from the experience of South Africa", summarized seven lessons we could learn from the South African experience.