Impediments to Pursuing Graduate Studies in South Africa: The Role of the Family, Social Class, and Race
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Increasing the number of graduate students has been identified as a priority for South African universities. Despite the shortage of graduate students in South Africa and the impetus to increase the number of graduate students, little is known about some of the impediments that undergraduate students, particularly Black students, face in pursuing graduate school. This paper critically examines the role of the family, social class, and race in considering the pursuit of graduate studies, from the perspective of students. The research adopts intersectionality as a theoretical framework and is based on focus group interviews with student participants. The findings indicate that race and social class must be understood as factors that operate concurrently and that participants’ educational plans are informed by the needs of their family and by raceclass factors. Socio-political and economic factors in South Africa are also discussed in relation to the family, class, race and the pursuit of graduate studies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".