South Africa’s competitive disciplinary advantage to attract international PhD students

This project builds on the work done by Cloete et al. on South Africa as a doctoral hub and seeks to explore in which disciplinary fields South African attracts higher numbers of international students and why. I propose a mixed methods study in where we combine both an analysis of HEMIS data, analysis of grey literature and qualitative data.

When we investigate the presence of international students at South African public universities we can do so on three levels. Firstly, on a national level. We know that South Africa is a hub for doctoral education. This is due to the fact that South Africa is an affordable destination for postgraduate studies. Although not explicitly stated as an objective, the NDP 2030 vision also calls for efforts to “establish South Africa as a hub for higher education and training in the region capable of attracting a significant share of the international student population” (NPC 2011: 278). In 2017, 40% of doctoral enrolments and 45% of doctoral graduates were international students. This signifies a near doubling of the proportion of international doctoral enrolments over the last 18 years.

A second level of analysis is on the institutional level. We know that South African HEIs have, to varying degrees, internationalisation strategies and collaborative agreements which attract students from abroad. Looking at the proportion of international doctoral enrolment across the public universities in South Africa, we see that in 2017, the top enrollers of international doctoral students were UFH, UNISA, UCT and UKZN. The proportion of international enrolments also varied quite noticeably across the different institutions.

The third level of analysis is that at the disciplinary level. From our studies of the basic and social sciences in South Africa, we learnt that the proportion of international students vary quite significantly across disciplinary fields. On a broad disciplinary level (CESM 1) we see that in 2017, fields such as Computer Sciences, Mathematics and Statistics and Engineering drew higher proportions (nearly half of doctoral enrolments) of international students while fields such as Visual Arts and Psychology enrolled fewer foreign students.