Bibliographic record
Abstract
On the back of decades of austerity, marketisation, credentialization and related neoliberal conceptions of education and society, a student debt crisis has emerged in higher education (HE). Despite the well-documented history of government-guaranteed income contingent loans (ICLs) indenturing students and their present and future families, such loans continue to be canvassed by policymakers and interest groups as an ideal ladder of educational opportunity, particularly for students from traditionally excluded communities. In this paper, the author brings together insights from Jeffrey Williams’ Pedagogy of Debt, Carter G Woodson’s Miseducation, Ha-Joon Chang’s idea of Bad Samaritans, and Kwame Nkrumah’s theory of Sham Independence as conceptual building blocks to reinforce the wall of resistance against the orthodoxy of debt as a paradigm for HE funding in South Africa. To add to the student debt abolition movements and the voices calling for freeing public HE, this paper critically reviews the recommendations of South Africa’s 2017 Fees Commission Report. This is done to offer an analysis that makes explicit the likely impact of the proposed student loan policy on South Africa. As we imagine transitioning towards the new African University, this paper makes a case for freeing public HE for all, on the basis of mutual aid, transitional and reparative justice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".