For sustainable funding and fees, the undergraduate system in South Africa must be restructured

South Africa has the most diverse and differentiated higher education system in Africa -despite some persistent attempts at academic drift and mimetic normative isomorphism. Globally, in the 2008 country system ranking by the Shanghai JiaoTong Academic Ranking of World Universities, the South African higher education system was placed in the range between 27 and 33 along with the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Ireland. It is well known that South Africa consistently has four of the five African universities that appear in the Shanghai top 500.