Closing South Africa’s high-skilled worker gap: Higher education challenges and pathways
South Africa has a peculiar high level of unemployment especially among the youth, women and low-skilled workforce. This is partly due to constraints inherited from the apartheid era, such as the imbalance in the spatial distribution between jobs and people, as well as inequities in access to quality training for certain population groups.
Unemployment is also persistent due to the progressive erosion of low-skilled jobs to the benefit of highly skilled jobs. This structural transformation in the economy poses a real risk of increased marginalization of low-skilled workers in the labour market. Within that context, this paper focusses on the implications for the development of higher education in response to the growing demand for highly skilled workers.