Many students affected as delays in NSFAS appeals lead to the termination of registrations

The NSFAS appeals process has not been concluded but due to the deadline of the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) for institutions to submit data on the number of registered students, the North-West University (NWU) had to terminate the registration of many conditionally registered students.

The DHET’s website indicates that the Higher Education Management Information System data (HEMIS data) refers to information on the academic structure, student applications, student registrations, examinations, and financial information of tertiary institutions

“Due to NSFAS’s inability to handle appeals on time, the university, unfortunately, had to make a decision,” said Danie Hefer, the manager of financial support services on the Potchefstroom campus.

According to a NSFAS policy document, “an appeal is a request submitted by a student whose application for funding was rejected, or whose funding was withdrawn, requesting NSFAS to review or reconsider his or her eligibility”.

The NWU student representative council (SRC) is collaborating with the South African Union of Students (SAUS) to expedite the clearance process. According to Yikumba Andreas, the president of the NWU SRC, at a series of meetings held in March, NSFAS assured attendees that the issue would be resolved before the second quarter commences.

However, the second quarter is already underway, and the problem has not been resolved. The SRC did follow up but received no reply. “We reached out to them and they did not say anything … no communication whatsoever,” Andreas said.

NSFAS also said that they will deploy task teams to tertiary institutions to help students resolve the problems, according to Andreas. The NWU expected the task team to arrive in the first week of May but “they did not show up”. A NSFAS employee said they are currently at another university, Andreas said.

All the SRC can do now is to continuously raise the issues students are facing with SAUS “because they have direct communication with NSFAS”, Andreas said. “We asked them [SAUS] to organise a peaceful protest at their [NSFAS’s] head office but there was no response from the union. To a certain extent, it feels like [SAUS] has abandoned ship.”

According to Hefer, it is impossible to determine how many NSFAS students are affected by the termination of registration. Many students who pay cash did not pay their registration fees, and many others were provisionally registered but have since been accepted at other universities or decided to not continue their studies. Information about which students filed for appeal was also not made available to the NWU to identify those students, he said.

Although NSFAS has cleared 500 NWU students since the appeal process commenced, many are still waiting for feedback. In a bid to resolve the issue, the NWU paid the minimum registration fees for 122 students. If NSFAS approves the students, the costs can be recovered, Hefer said.

The 122 students are final year NSFAS students in 2023 who were funded by NSFAS in 2022, he said. This means that these students complied with the N+1 rule: less than 60 credits or more than 50% of modules passed in the previous year and who have four or fewer modules remaining to complete their degree.

With faculty approval, the NWU will also allow senior students who could be identified, and who can prove that they attended class and are academically up to date, to register – possibly up until the second semester, according to Hefer.

Students who have been approved by NSFAS but received an email or SMS stating that their conditional registration has been deleted, must send enquiries to JudyHeymans@nwu.ac.za for assistance.