Why so many deserving students do not get into university

TimesLIVE

10-07-2025

My audience for this column is grade 12 pupils who are unlikely to have codes 6s (70-79%) and 7s (80-100%) in their National Senior Certificate exam results. Those achievers can mostly fend for themselves.
I am writing for deserving pupils who receive codes 5s (60-69%) and sometimes 6s and who intend to apply to university from poor and working class communities as potential first-generation students; that is, those who often do not have parents who attended university and can therefore help them with advice and the completion of application forms. As someone who works in both schools and universities, here are 10 reasons why so many deserving students do not make it into higher education.
1. You are competing with tens of thousands of other matriculants — therefore your marks (codes 1-7) matter more than anything else.
Bear this in mind when you apply to university. It is a highly competitive process and therefore nothing matters more than the quality of your pass. Put bluntly, the more 6s and 7s you have, the more likely you are to get into your university of choice and your preferred qualification (degree).
2. To be safe, apply to more than one university, for example, all four Cape Town institutions or both Wits and the UJ in Johannesburg.
Hedge your bets. You will be sorely disappointed if the one university you applied to turns you down. There is also Unisa (distance education) if all else fails and your first choice, a residential university, falls through.
3. If you are not the strongest student, look for other degrees in the same area, for example, BA Law instead of LLB to improve your chances of getting in.
The LLB in this example is the premier law degree and the competition for limited spaces is tough. Therefore, consider allied qualifications, like the BA Law with the understanding that you can always transfer later to your preferred degree; in that case, know the rules of transfer back to front for the different degrees.
4. Know the requirements for the degree, for example, you cannot study medicine without mathematics and physical science.
Many prospective students are disappointed because they did not study closely the requirements for a preferred degree. For example, most degrees in the sciences require pure mathematics and so mathematical literacy is not going to help you, unfortunately.