Mabelebele said universities were willing to provide employers with a letter confirming that the student had graduated.

However, he highlighted that institutions of higher learning were in a “precarious financial position” due to a real decline in government subsidies over the last 10 years.

“Higher education expenditure is declining alarmingly in both real and student per capita terms. It is also declining as a percentage of the government’s budget subsidies.”

He said the decline put pressure on the two other sources of income available for the institutions, which were tuition fee income and “third stream income”.

This, he said, left universities in increasingly worsening financial positions.

He underlined that most universities “commit huge financial resources to support large numbers of financially deprived students” to obtain higher education qualifications.

For example, he said in 2012, Rhodes University spent R36 million out of its own coffers to support students who owed the university money.

He said that the expansion in student numbers in the higher education system was not matched by an increase in government funding. He warned that such a scenario could “jeopardise existing quality levels of higher education”.

Mabelebele cautioned that if the tertiary sector failed to “expand significantly”, this would continue to put pressure on universities to admit students while they did not have the required resources to support them.