ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an account of the higher education landscape in South Africa as a backdrop to an analysis of doctoral education. It shows how the massification of education (as attained through a doctoral degree) and how the promulgation of teaching towards measurable outputs, such as the pass rates in the National Senior Certificate (NSC), serve only to reinforce existent inequalities, by drawing on the South African educational landscape. Although globalisation in education has its benefits - commercial benefits, it often results in a loss of intellectual and cultural autonomy on the part of those who are less powerful, often reinforcing international inequalities. Higher education favoured the minority white group and the apartheid ideology resulted in the establishment of that was reserved for different racial groups. The South African system of doctoral education is among the most established on the African continent on the basis that, next to Egypt and Nigeria, it enrolls the most students.
