Hundreds of aspirant students stood, sat and slept in queues at Unisa in Durban, waiting to be registered for next year.
|||Durban - Hundreds of aspirant students stood, sat and slept in queues which snaked round the Unisa Durban campus on Thursday, waiting to be registered for next year.
The rush, which began at 4am and carried on until noon, was triggered by an SMS telling those who had applied to the National Student Financial Aid Scheme for study loans that they had to be provisionally registered by today, according to Unisa.
So, although the registration period for first-year students runs until January 26, desperate applicants refused to budge yesterday, even when the campus gates were shut.
The university usually only processes 800 registrations a day. By the time The Mercury arrived, it had already hit the 900 mark.
Unisa’s KZN spokeswoman, Gcina Nhleko, said that apart from yesterday, the influx of new registrations had been “sizeable but manageable”.
The university would probably have to contact the multi-billion rand government aid scheme, and ask for an extension of the deadline, she ventured.
However, the scheme’s chief executive, Nathan Johnstone, said the SMS could not have been sent from his office.
This was because the scheme did not dictate cut-off times, and did not award the loans to students individually – it gave a bulk sum to institutions which they were then responsible for allocating.
“It (the SMS) must have been from Unisa’s own administration office,” Johnstone said.
In previous years, submissions for study loans had to be made over the counter and, as a result, queues would stretch from Stalwart Simelane (Stanger) Street to the Durban Magistrate’s Court.
Earlier this year Unisa introduced a system which allowed students to drop their funding applications in metal bins.
Mukelani Ngcobo, a communications science student from Umlazi, said he had not moved in the queue for three hours despite arriving at 5am yesterday, and he would probably have to return today.
Also waiting were aspiring teachers Kimeshri Reddy and Dana Mlambo, although they intend paying their own tuition fees.
Mlambo said they were all desperate to be enrolled, to eventually be able to get “good and stable” jobs.
Unisa expects a total of 18 000 prospective students to register at the Durban campus alone during this intake. - The Mercury
