South Africa

I was expressing my emphatic skepticism about the numbers that you posted in your original post.

Then I tried to respond to what I took (apparently incorrectly) to be your real interest, in how the emigration of white professors will impact South African higher education and the DL programs that people talk about on this board.

It's closer to the realm of believability if it's spread over ten years. In a population of 5 million, that would be less than 2%/yr. While I don't believe that white South Africans typically have large families, there's still going to be some small natural increase the other way, so we are probably looking at net changes in South African white population in roughly the 1%/yr range.

That's totally different than your announcement in the first post that some unnamed "they" predict that 2/3'ds of South Africa's 5 million whites will be leaving the country in the next two years. That would be 3.3 million people flooding out in just two years, a refugee flood of dramatic proportions. We haven't seen numbers like that even in Somalia.

Maybe, but that's speculative. One could also suggest that white flight was greater earlier, as individuals fundamentally unreconciled to black majority rule took off. Today, demographics might actually be flattening out and approaching healthier rates of change, as people return as well as leave, as Lukeness suggests is starting to happen.

I already stated my views on that in my earlier post. Academic emigration is likely to be most significant among top scholars with international reputations who will be actively recruited by and offered positions at universities abroad. Loss of too many of these high-end people would reduce the doctoral-level research prominence of the leading South African universities, but that's unlikely to have as much effect on the kind of less scholarly vocational DL programs that interest Degreeinfo.

The biggest DL change that I foresee coming is that ZA is likely to start charging higher tuition to DL students residing in rich countries like the United States. But they will probably still try to price themselves below the competition so that they continue to gain market share. International low-cost DL provision could become a significant revenue generator for their higher education system. It's conceivable that South Africa could even try to turn itself into something like a world educational off-shoreing center.

Are you suggesting that the South African black population was previously living at developed world standards and that's suddenly no longer the case?

I think that it's probably most realistic to economically classify South Africa, not with the highly developed economies in Europe, US/Canada, Japan or Australia/NZ, but with places like China, India and Brazil, the poorer developing countries.

According to my 2009 'World Almanac', South Africa (all of its population, not just the whites) has a significantly higher average per-capita GDP than China, about equal to Brazil's.

I think that it's true that South Africa faces tremendous challenges. It's true that it has problems, some of them serious. It's true that some of those problems will impact its higher-education system and perhaps even the DL programs that it offers worldwide.

But I don't think that it's helpful to exaggerate South Africa's problems until they turn into some kind of fanciful apocalypse.

 

It might be a good thing for everyone to do a little reading about South Africa. To my eyes they seem to be trying really hard to solve their problems.

South African Newspapers : Newspapers from South Africa : South African News

 

Duplicate post

 

Welcome back Super....Moderator

 

Detroit, Rhodesia, South Africa, Birmingham AL, Camden NJ. There is a pattern here. They all go in the same predictable direction.

The Cycle:
1st: Demands
2nd: Hoopla
3rd: Crime increases
4th: Bankruptcy

 

That must have went over my head.

 

Yeah mine too. Or someones just talking sh*t.

 

Dang it Zanger your not helping...lol


Thanks Steve, It always pays to keep a smart person around (and yes I'm talking about you Steve )

 

@b4cz28 when will "supercopone" come to Singapore or Beijing to find a job???

 

Interesting discussion... I have learned a lot about South Africa's brain drain. However, this is not a new phenomenon and definitely not limited to South Africa. It’s a recurring problem throughout the developing word. For example, look at the following report: http://www.un.org/esa/population/meetings/IttMigLAC/P10_WB-DECRG.pdf

Some of the most interesting quotes are:

“For example, as of 2000, over 80% of the college educated people from Haiti, Jamaica and Guyana were living abroad.”

“On the other hand, 27% of migrants [to the US] from Brazil, 33 % from Argentina, 40% from Venezuela and 30% from Chile arriving in the 1980s have at least a college degree. The same numbers are astoundingly different for migrants from the rest of the world. For example, 63% of migrants from India and 58% from the Philippines have at least a college degree.”

This doesn’t mean that many of Latin America’s top universities are destined to crumble as many of its top graduates emigrate. The same could be said about other regions including Africa.

 

Something tells me they won't give me a gun to tote. All joking aside, I will never work in law enforcement again, but if I were to, I would love the opportunity to work in another country. I applied and was hired to work with Black Water in Iraq and was going to do it, but my wife cried for the whole week before I was to go and quit eating. It was going to pay $120,000 plus all my expenses, travel etc. I was also hired to with KBR and when it came time to leave she did the same thing, it only paid $80,000 a year but it was a sweeter job with more travel. We were to pick VIP's up across the Globe and escort them where ever they needed to go and then bring them back. My size and experience made those jobs easy to get.