Ensuring Access With Success in Higher Education

Due to the country’s colonial and apartheid histories, South Africa’s higher education has been undergoing transformation since 1994. This significantly increased access for historically disadvantaged students, among other things. However, their success rates have not improved proportionally and higher education’s response to this “success crisis” has largely been academic development programmes (ADPs). There is extensive quantitative research on these ADPs for students in the natural sciences, but minimal research on those in the humanities and social sciences. In this chapter, I present a qualitative study examining the Reaching for Excellence and Achievement Program’s (REAP) contribution to student success. REAP was an extracurricular ADP in the humanities faculty at Wits University. I conducted two in-depth one-on-one interviews with each of the four REAP alumni who participated in this study. Using thematic analysis, I found that REAP provided crucial support for its students’ success, including academic literacy and cultural capital development, mentorship and connections to various support structures on campus. This demonstrates the potential of an academic programme to enhance student support. However, I also found that historically disadvantaged students face differing challenges, some of which are beyond the university. The implication of these findings is that, while beneficial, ADPs alone are not sufficient to address the success crisis; Student support requires the collaborative efforts of all higher education stakeholders.