THE deteriorating skills of new students is the biggest problem universities in South Africa have to deal with, a Karoofees debate heard yesterday. It is a crisis related directly to the even bigger problem of a general deterioration in school education.

The debate was on the state of South Africa's universities, a topic that was selected because of the recent campaign around language at the University of Stellenbosch.

Professor Thomas Eloff, rector of the University of North-west in Potchefstroom, said the linguistic and conceptual skills of new students had fallen from 72% to 58%. He said a group of engineers had told him new graduates were told to stay away from machinery for two years lest they break it.

There was broad agreement among participants and members of the audience over this major fault in the system. Jimmy Ellis, head of international affairs at the University of Johannesburg, said he was hearing more and more of students who couldn't read, write or think properly.

Eloff ascribed this less to the new outcome-based school education system than to the growing dominance of TV over the past decade. But he hinted at other pressures, such as the "overwhelming insistence on transformation", while Mbula Yoyo of Fort Hare University said there was a constant drive to give pass marks to disadvantaged students.

Ellis said responsibility for funding studies had been devolved to students themselves, and their parents. Regarding language, Yoyo said it was considered axiomatic for English universities to set certain standards in order to keep the university English, but this leeway was not given in the case of other languages.

During an earlier debate participants agreed that problems with conceptualisation and language use could be solved far better through mother tongue education.

Eloff said the old slogan from UDF days, "Let the Doors of Education Open", had referred to high school education being made available to people of all backgrounds. Only a limited number of students could be allowed to go to university, as there was simply not enough money.

He also cautioned against everybody emulating the universities of Cape Town, Stellenbosch and Witwatersrand - the only three to be listed among the top 500 in the world. Although scientific research had also taken a dip, as measured in the number of new papers, and was another major problem, it was now necessary to focus more on training people to train others than to produce geniuses.

Tertiary education was also being constrained by what many regard as interference in university matters by the government, Eloff and Ellis said. Student numbers were limited in certain departments - so-called "capping", which has led to vociferous debate in university circles. But both agreed it was a reality that universities were a national asset, so a balance had to be found between autonomy and interference.

A women identifying herself only as a marketer at a university said that the new merged universities had become one grey mass. They were all "more of the same" and did little to distinguish themselves from each other. The result was that they, in effect, retained the identities they had had in the past.