The university, industry and government partnerships, a title that contains three institutions and two dashes and no verbs, and which I am expected to make thrilling.
The braid
My central image was a golden braid. The academy, the marketplace, the state, three strands twisted into national prosperity. It works because it is true and because it is pretty, and I have learned that a metaphor needs to be both or it does not survive the tea break.
What I did not say, is that a braid requires all three strands to be roughly the same length, to be held by one pair of hands, and to have no opinions. Ours have opinions. Ours arrive in separate vehicles at separate times with separate views on whether it should be a braid at all, or whether it should first be workshopped as a rope, with terms of reference.
A braid left unattended for a decade does not remain a braid. It becomes a situation. It becomes something you address with scissors and a decision.
Nevertheless: three strands.
The figures
Overall unemployment, 32.7 percent. Youth unemployment approaching 60 percent. Graduate unemployment at 12.4 percent, up from 3.6 percent in 2008.
Society paid for those graduates. The state paid, families paid, someone's aunt paid, and quite often the graduate is still paying. To educate a person at considerable collective expense and then have no use for them is not merely an economic inefficiency. It is a sort of institutional rudeness.
Ideally no graduate should be unemployed. Even one unemployed graduate represents a loss of potential. There is a structural mismatch between educational outcomes and labour market requirements. It is the politest sentence in the sector. It says: you studied a thing, the economy wanted a different thing, and no one present is at fault, because the fault has been relocated into a structure, and the structure is not on the guest list. The structure never attends. We keep laying a place for it anyway.
The remedy: work integrated learning, digital skills, demand led training, and partnership pursued collectively rather than through isolated institutional initiatives.
What each of us owes
Universities are incubators of talent, innovation and conscience. I mean it. A graduate should have the technical proficiency and the judgement, the data analytics and the ethical spine, digital literacy and some sense of obligation to the people who funded the lecture theatre. I have met graduates with all of the first halves and none of the second, and several of them have since been the subject of commissions of inquiry.
Industry is the place where theory meets practice, which is generous, since practice frequently meets theory at the door and asks whether it has a certificate. You cannot expect universities to deliver a fully formed employee at no cost and no involvement, then complain about the specification. Fund the research. Take the interns. Provide the mentors. Regard the university as a partner in the creation of prosperity, not as a supplier of human resources.
Government is the steward of national vision: funding, incentives, coherence, equitable access, and a role that extends beyond regulation into catalysis. A catalyst is the substance that makes the reaction happen without being consumed by it. That is either a compliment or the most precise description of a department ever entered into minutes, and I have decided, not to decide which.
Evidence, of which there was some
More than a decade of partnership with the Technology Innovation Agency at Wits. Roughly R20 million in seed funding. Around 86 percent of supported projects closed out, international patents granted, spin outs beginning to appear. A moringa extract pilot plant walking itself out of the laboratory towards production at scale, with actual pipes and actual valves and actual regulatory headaches, which is how you know it is real.
Then the policy hub at Stellenbosch, launched this year, assembled to gather the scattered limbs of our innovation system into something with a spine. Our research and development spend sits at about 0.66 percent of GDP, a figure that sounds small because it is. The partners include the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation, the CSIR, philanthropic funders, entrepreneurship institutions, with conversations towards the World Bank, the UNDP and GIZ. The lesson I drew was fragmentation. We do not lack capability. We lack alignment between policy, funding, institutions and infrastructure, and alignment is unglamorous work that no one names a building after.
The lesson from all three is systematic, funded, outcome directed collaboration sustained over decades. It is a modest lesson and therefore a difficult one to fund. Nobody launches an initiative called Sustained Boring Follow Through. I would attend the launch. I would sit in the front row.
Five things, because it is always five
Work integrated learning, so that a qualification touches a workplace before graduation rather than after it.
Digital skills, treated as core rather than as an optional module offered on a Friday afternoon by an enthusiast.
Youth employment placements, and here I lean on the word placements, because we have accumulated an impressive national stockpile of commitments, pledges, memoranda and intentions, and a young person cannot eat a memorandum.
Entrepreneurship, so that we stop producing graduates who can only look for a job and start producing some who can make one.
And partnership itself, with shared accountability and co designed pathways, resilient enough to survive a change of minister and a change of vice chancellor.
The fourth strand
Graduate unemployment is not only a failure of partnership. It is also a failure of guidance. We have allowed our technical and vocational institutions to thin out while teaching an entire nation that dignity arrives stapled to a degree certificate. In Switzerland, where roughly two thirds of young people take a technical or vocational route and nobody's mother weeps at the kitchen table about it. We still need welders and plumbers, that we discovered this rather urgently during COVID, and that we continue to treat those occupations as consolation prizes.
What a doctorate is actually for. Who it helps. What it repairs. Whether it lives anywhere other than a shelf. China has turned towards more practically oriented doctoral work, and our postgraduate research and our community problems appear to be conducted in separate buildings on separate continents.
The braid needs a fourth strand, and it appears to be honesty.