ABSTRACT

Universities have been forced to raise higher education fees with above inflation rates due to increasing operating costs and higher student numbers and decreasing real term government funding. While free higher education or other alternative funding models are being considered, the higher education sector is at stake: a sector that plays a vital role in creating improved lives for all South Africans. A sustainable framework is desperately required or universities will once again need to increase student fees at unreasonable rates to maintain quality. We therefore performed a mixed method documentary analysis to prove that fee-free higher education is not viable in South Africa as significant funds will either need to be reallocated from other sectors that also require funding, or it will have to be collected from already overburdened tax payers. The present study also developed a viable student fee regulatory framework with the use of grounded theory: subsidised higher education with the effective use of the already implemented National Student Financial Aid Scheme.

No abstract

Questionnaires are widely used in the Accountancy field as a data collection instrument. However, previous studies have contentious views on the reliability of questionnaires in academic studies.This study describes the development of a custom-made questionnaire to evaluate the effectiveness of a teaching-learning intervention, the Audit Cube, designed to affect the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values of Auditing of B.Com. honours students in the Accountancy field at a SAICA-accredited university. The questionnaire was distributed to 156 university honours students, whereafter it was validated and standardised. Most of the extracted factors indicated a reliability level higher than 0.9, signifying that the constructs were suitable to address the project's research question and that the questionnaire is valid. In conclusion, this study found that the use of questionnaires in academic studies is deemed reliable if a standardised process is followed in its development. Consequently, the study suggests that custom-made questionnaires should undergo factor analysis to prove the instrument's validity prior to reporting on the findings. The findings of this study may be useful to academics in providing guidelines in developing their own data collection instrument to measure the effectiveness of a teaching-learning intervention and may also support the use of questionnaires by researchers in the teaching-learning environment.

The #FeesMustFall campaign evolved from a demand for lower fees for higher education to fee-free higher education in merely two years, necessitating extensive reconsideration of the state budget. Over the same period, marginal tax rate and value added tax (VAT) increases have been felt by South African individual taxpayers. Therefore an exploratory, document analysis has been performed to determine the extent to which the #FeesMustFall campaign has been shifted to the individual taxpayer between the 2015 and 2019 years of assessment. The findings indicate that the demand for increased financial support of students led to the recent VAT and marginal tax rate increases, but that tax revenue is actually declining: the VAT increase has partially covered the increase in social grants to protect the poor from the VAT increase, and the marginal tax rate increase is resulting in reduced growth in tax revenue collection as individual taxpayers are overburdened and therefore, tax avoidance is increasing while productivity is decreasing. The present study provides taxpayers with clarity on the recent tax increases and emphasises to National Treasury that any further tax increase would be to the country's detriment.