One of the major challenges in higher education is inability displayed by South African universities in recruiting and retaining black staff members, a highly contested issue after apartheid. Related to this particular problem, two main sets of literature can be identified in the South African context. The first set concerns studies that predominantly deal with statistical equity profiling, patterns and trends in university staff. These studies discuss academic staff transformation using statistical equity profiling as a means of identifying the extent of demographic change, i.e. measuring how institutions are progressing in terms of structural dimensions of transformation and in terms of changing the demographics of their academic staff with reference to government policy on employment equity. They generally privilege quantitative methods in their analysis of academic staff transformation.

Published in: Canada International Conference on Education, 2017

• Date of Conference: 26-29 June, 2017
• DOI: 10.2053/CICE.2017.0268
• Electronic ISBN: 978-1-908320-83-4
• Conference Location: University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada