Educational Opportunity in Post Apartheid South Africa: An analysis of access, choice and mobility in the Western Cape Province

Lori Hill

South Africa’s history of state enforced restrictions on interracial schooling and access to urban space for Blacks has had a profound impact on educational inequality. The end of apartheid and formal removal of such structural barriers to educational opportunity raise important questions about how South African youth and their families will take advantage of a more open educational opportunity structure and the ways in which migration between educational contexts (e.g., public to private, segregated to integrated) might be linked to migration between residential contexts (e.g., rural to urban). This project considers the relationship between the choices youth and their families make within a more open system of educational opportunity and emerging patterns of residential mobility in and around South Africa’s urban centers. The study explores this relationship by addressing the following questions: To what extent have expanded educational opportunities defined new patterns of access to schooling? What is the nature of the relationship between observed patterns of educational access and choice and residential migration? To what extent have family decisions about schooling in the new educational structure maintained, reduced or redefined previous patterns of educational inequality in South Africa? What are the implications of these relationships for the future social mobility of racial groups subordinated under apartheid? The project employs data from the Cape Area Panel Study in conjunction with the South African Schools Register of Needs Survey. The Cape Area Panel Study is a longitudinal study of approximately 4500 youth between the ages of 14 and 22 who reside in the Cape Town metropolitan area. Cape Town and the Western Cape Province emerged as strongholds for the apartheid regime’s white ruling party by maintaining the rigid restrictions on access to the region for South Africans of color. In addition to its high concentration of whites, the Western Cape has also maintained a disproportionately high concentration of Coloured residents due to its status as a labor preference area for Coloureds. The racial composition that resulted from this unique history of racial population control, coupled with steadily increasing streams of migration by Africans from surrounding rural areas make metropolitan Cape Town a useful context in which to consider how the elimination of the formal constraints on educational opportunity has affected educational inequality among racial groups. This project seeks to contribute to existing research by focusing on patterns of access and movement within the South Africa’s new educational structure as outcomes that are related to, but importantly distinct from educational outcomes such as school achievement and attainment. In this way, it is intended to provide an important perspective on some of the macro-level social mechanisms that inform achievement and attainment processes and that may be redefining educational inequality in the new South Africa.

About Lori Hill

Lori Diane Hill received her A.B. in sociology from Brown University in 1992. She holds a M.A. (1996) and a Ph.D (2001) in sociology from the University of Chicago. In August 2003, Dr. Hill will complete a postdoctoral fellowship in the Ford Foundation Program on Poverty the Underclass and Public Policy at the University of Michigan. She will begin an assistant professorship in Education and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan in 2004. Her areas of research focus include inequality, sociology of education and urban social process. Her past research has examined the ways in which social structures in schools and in communities shape opportunities and status attainment processes for youth. Her current research agenda focuses on the linkages between spatial transformations taking place in and around South Africa’s urban centers and their impact on education at the institutional- and school organizational-levels and as reflected in the experiences of black South African youth. Dr. Hill’s agenda for international research also includes collaboration on a comparative study that will in part examine micro- and macro-structural influences (in communities and schools) on educational opportunities for secondary school youth in the United States and South Africa.