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NSFAS Logo.
The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) says it has provisionally funded more than 600,000 eligible students at various universities for the 2025 academic year. More than 200,000 students have been fully funded.
The scheme was giving an update on the status of NSFAS applications for this year before the Select Committee on Education, Sciences and Creative Industries in Parliament.
NSFAS Acting CEO, Waseem Carrim says there are few applications on review. He says the provisional figure includes applications that are on appeal whereby students aren’t happy with the rejection made on their applications for funding.
“We have very few applications that are still on review, just 22. We do still have some which are on the verification status, which we are working hard to be able to clear. Some are still being assessed financially and with academic eligibility. The majority you will see are on provisionally funded status; 660,000 of them are there. We have about 97,000 rejected applications. We have about 70,000 that are on appeal. Registration data comes almost on a daily basis from the universities. We do have a deadline of the 31st of March for the registration data,” explains Carrim.
The fund says about 243,000 eligible students have been fully funded through their institutions.
“The majority of the registration data has been coming in. To date, we’ve confirmed we have funded 243,000 students. We are aiming, by the end of this month, to have all students shifted from provisionally funded to fully funded based on the registration data that has been received. In terms of Sassa applications, we have 733,000 Sassa applications. For these, the majority is 703,000 (that) are provisionally funded; 14,200 were cancelled; 12,700 were rejected based on the academic eligibility and one is still waiting for the academic results,” Carrim adds.
He says they have already disbursed about R48 billion to institutions of higher learning for the funding of students.
“Just in terms of our budgetary constraints, NSFAS has allocated a combined value of about R48.4 billion for learning in the 2025 academic year. Of that, about R5.9 billion has already been disbursed to universities representing about 15% of the allocation while an additional R751 million has been disbursed to the TVET colleges and about R8 billion,” he adds.
Acting DG of the Department of Higher Education and Training, Dr Marcia Socikwa says the scheme will make a proposal to its board for a new model of disbursing student funds directly to them rather than using the current method via the universities.
“And we certainly hope that in the new modelling, and we are at the level of … NSFAS is going to encourage the board to consider a cost-effective way of disbursements, such that the middleman is not the beneficiary to the detriment of our students. Our students remain first and foremost our key stakeholders, not the middleman,” says Socikwa.
Video: NSFAS calls for higher education to make TVET, CET colleges attractive for students:
