Introduction

This chapter overviews the fields of higher education and the capabilities approach in at least four ways, by (1) sharing the perspectives of high school learners and first year university students on the transition from school to university; (2) expanding the capabilities and higher education literatures with a specific focus on access and the transition from school to university; (3) demonstrating how theoretical concepts of the capabilities approach can be operationalised and empirically applied in a specific higher education context; (4) providing a framework that schools and universities could use/adapt to support students making the transition to university. The growing disintegration of quality schooling in South Africa has been well documented. Further, much has been written about the history of South Africa's education system and the transition process since the fall of apartheid. Like higher education, the school system, up until the early 1990s, had been firmly designed along racial and ethnic lines, with an explicitly ideological approach to curriculum.