#FeesMustFall: Causes, Characteristics, and Higher Education Policy Implications of the 2015 South African Student Movement

The South African student movement known as #FeesMustFall propelled students as political actors briefly onto the center-stage of national higher education policy making in October 2015. After less than two weeks of nationally coordinated, mostly peaceful student protests about tuition fees in public universities and related demands, South African President Jacob Zuma in an unprecedented and clearly panicked response, announced that there would be no increase in university tuition fees in 2016. Meanwhile, student representatives have been a formal part of higher education policy making on the institutional and national level at least since 1997; the same post-apartheid legal framework for higher education firmly gives university councils sole control over tuition fees as part of an established funding model of cost-sharing. Against the background of the current economic, ideological and political crisis in South Africa, this paper considers the causes of the 2015 student protests, its characteristics as an internet-age, networked student movement, and its immediate policy implications for higher education and likely long-term implications for the governance of the higher education sector in South Africa