About CHET's On-line Indicators

The 1997 White Paper on Higher Education Transformation and the 2001 National Plan for Higher Education indicated that the South African government would develop steering mechanisms, involving planning and funding, to assist with the transformation of the public higher education system. For this process of steering by planning and funding to function effectively, it is crucial that university councils understand how performance will be measured by the Department of Education. CHET’s experience has been that this will not be an easy task for many university councils; currently very few institutions produce data sets which enable council members to engage meaningfully in discussions about the performance of their institution.

Because CHET has been involved since 2000 with various aspects of performance indicators, it has decided to make performance indicator data available on-line to enable university councils to better assess performance relative to the Minister’s targets, to their own institutional missions and to the performance of their peers. This data tool will also be of use to higher education researchers, analysts, policy-makers and other decision-makers seeking a more detailed, emperically-based picture of South African higher education based on their particular requirements and interests.

The data is therefore presented in such a way as to allow users to manipulate and extract the data according to their specific needs. Users are be able to select an indicator (e.g. student enrolments), refine the indicators and select up to four institutions to compare. All data is presented in graphical format and is made available as an Excel download. Additional tools such as key definitions, access to full institutional reports and the opportunity to comment on the graphs are also available.

In order to generate a graph, start by selecting an indicator and then follow the three simple steps to generate a graph.