ABSTRACT
South Africa is commonly seen as a bizarre exception to every other industrial ized or third world country as a consequence of apartheid. But the ubiquity of apartheid should not lead to an overemphasis on the idiosyncratic features of South Africa at the expense of the common ones, since this would curtail the possibilities for fruitful comparative analysis. This chapter analyzes some of the common structural features of tertiary education in South Africa and shows the ways in which they have been shaped by apartheid.
