Sue Blaine
6 November 2008
Johannesburg — Training CAs anywhere is a tough job, but two features of SA's society worsen the problem: first, there are not enough youngsters leaving school with good enough mathematics marks to fill the benches in universities' Bachelor of Commerce (Accounting) lecture halls; and second, there are not enough experienced CAs to teach those who do.
The severity of the problem became apparent this week when Business Day revealed that Saica is threatening to withdraw its accreditation of the University of the Witwatersrand's (Wits's) School of Accounting. That is because Saica fears that the lack of a full staff complement at Wits is putting its excellent standards in jeopardy.
However, Wits is just one of the 13 South African universities certified to educate prospective CAs that has received a warning of this nature from Saica. The professional body's senior executive for transformation and growth, Chantyl Mulder, refused to list the other troubled institutions.
Yesterday Saica released the results of a study into SA's shortage of CAs. Its executive president, Ignatius Sehoole, says SA is short of 22000 CAs, and the biggest hurdle to closing this gap is the lack of matriculants with good enough marks in mathematics.
The professional body has 23974 white members, 2204 "Asians", 1132 blacks and 581 coloureds, plus a small percentage who describe themselves as "other". Since it wants its membership to reflect SA's demographics, there is lots of work to do.
The lack of good higher grade mathematics passes is SA's "big problem", says JET Education Services CEO Dr Nick Taylor.
"That's our big problem, but what more can you say about it? It goes back to primary school. The kids are not prepared well enough for high school and so when they get there, there's a backlog. Then the high schools don't teach well either. It's a failure of our entire educational system," he says.
Last year, of the 564775 matric candidates who wrote their final exams, only 25415 passed mathematics on the higher grade.
But even this is not good enough. A C+ (65%) or higher pass in higher grade mathematics is a prerequisite for entrance into a BComm (Accounting) and many other professional degrees.
Last year only 700 of those who passed higher grade mathematics with a C+ or more were black, says Saica's transformation project director, Natalie Zimmelman.
"Only 700 in the whole of SA. We have to compete for them along with the engineers, doctors and other professions," she says.
To increase the number of black and coloured CAs in SA, Saica has adopted an educational philosophy which takes practical form in its successful bursary scheme and in its Thuthuka Education Upliftment Project, launched in May 2002.
The programme spends R60000 on each sponsored student and gives them comprehensive support, from accommodation and a food budget to extra tuition, mentorship and life skills training, says Mulder.
"If you are a black kid from rural Limpopo and you come to the city to study, you are on your own. You don't know where to find the student support offices and you are terrified to ask questions in class. Our students need support; they need not to worry about how they are going to (afford to) travel home to eat. This kind of thing is often so stressful for them that they drop out, but not because of a lack of academic capability," says Zimmelman.
The Thuthuka bursary programme works. It has a first-year pass rate of 89% and a pass rate of "just on 70%" for the following two years of the BComm (Accounting), says Mulder.
The Thuthuka bursary fund sponsored 703 students at the universities of Johannesburg, Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Pretoria and at Port Elizabeth's Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University this year. Next year the universities of Free State and KwaZulu-Natal are to join the scheme, and Saica is working with Wits to get it to rejoin.
A BComm (Accounting) programme is notoriously difficult to finish within its set three years. And the problem of the small pool of matriculants available to study in fields which require a certain standard of higher grade mathematics is aggravated by the very low average pass rate across the Saica-accredited accounting programmes. These are offered by the six universities involved in the bursary scheme and Rhodes University, North West University, and the universities of Fort Hare, Western Cape and of SA.
According to Mulder, only 11% of a given first-year cohort of students finish the course in the required three years. Saica wants a minimum 70% pass rate year on year, meaning that 35% of any first-year class passes the degree within three years.
Saica suspended the Wits Thuthuka bursary scheme programme because its pass rate was lower than this, especially for black students, says Mulder.
What was revealed through this action was that Wits' educational philosophy is at odds with that of the Thuthuka programme, she says.
"Our educational philosophy is very different to Wits's. For Wits, all students are the same and must be treated the same. They believe that if they get into Wits they should pass because of their stringent entry requirements.
"Our suspension of the Thuthuka programme had nothing to do with standards (at Wits School of Accounting) and everything to do with the students not getting the additional support Thuthuka believes is necessary."
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