How Many Academics Are There to Supervise You? South Africa’s University Staff in 2024

Key finding: South Africa’s 26 public universities employed 20 887 permanent instruction and research staff in 2024 — the people who teach and supervise 1 115 580 enrolled students, of whom 90 010 are master’s and doctoral candidates. That is roughly 53 students, and 4.3 postgraduate research candidates, per permanent academic.

Almost everything written about South African higher education counts students. This page counts the other side of the relationship: the staff. The figures come from one document — the Department of Higher Education and Training’s Statistics on Post-School Education and Training in South Africa, 2024, Table 4.8, drawn from the 2024 HEMIS database with data extracted in October 2025.

What the staff numbers actually are

Each figure, quotable on its own:

• Public universities in South Africa employed 65 585 permanent staff in 2024, a decrease of 0.5% (358 people) from 65 943 in 2023 (DHET, 2024).
• 20 887 of them — 31.8% — were instruction and research staff, the category DHET also calls academic staff (DHET, 2024).
• 33 366 — 50.9% — were administrative staff. There are approximately 1.6 permanent administrative staff for every permanent academic (DHET, 2024).
• Women held 36 017 permanent posts (54.9%) against 29 568 for men (45.1%), but the academic category is the exception: 49.6% female against 50.4% male, and only 12 of the 26 public universities had above-average female representation among academic staff (DHET, 2024).

Two definitions that decide what the number means

Before you use 20 887 in a sentence, read the two notes printed under the source table. They are not decoration — they change the meaning of the figure substantially.

“Permanent” is defined by pension, not by contract length. DHET defines a permanent staff member as “an employee who contributes to an institutional pension or retirement fund”. Every academic on a fixed-term contract, every post-doctoral fellow teaching a course, every part-time lecturer brought in for one module and every retired professor still supervising a candidate is outside this count. The real teaching and supervising complement at South African universities is therefore larger than 20 887 — the published series simply does not tell you by how much.

“Instruction and research staff” is defined by how time is spent. DHET’s note reads: staff “who spend more than 50% of their official time on duty on instruction and research activities”. It is a time-allocation category, not a job title and not a qualification threshold. A head of school who has dropped below half-time on teaching and research moves out of the category; a junior lecturer with no doctorate and no supervision rights sits inside it.

Both notes push in the same direction: 20 887 is neither the number of people who can supervise a dissertation nor the total number of people who teach. It is the number of permanently employed staff whose main official activity is instruction and research. That is a useful, citable quantity — as long as you say which quantity it is.

The ratio, and the four things it does not mean

Divide the 2024 enrolment of 1 115 580 by 20 887 permanent academics and you get 53.4 students per permanent academic. Restrict it to research degrees — 63 327 master’s and 26 683 doctoral enrolments, 90 010 together — and you get 4.3 postgraduate research candidates per permanent academic.

Those two numbers are worth having, and they are frequently misused. Four cautions:

1. It is not a supervision load. Supervision is distributed extremely unevenly. Many academics supervise nobody in a given year; a research-active professor may carry ten or more candidates. The mean tells you about system capacity, not about any individual’s workload.
2. It is not a staff-student ratio in the sense a university planner uses. Planners weight by full-time equivalents and by contact mode. This is a headcount divided by a headcount.
3. It understates the teaching complement, because contract and part-time academics are excluded by the permanence definition above.
4. It hides enormous institutional variation. A national mean over 26 very different universities is a starting point for a question, not an answer to one.

This is the same discipline our postgraduate enrolment roundup applies to graduate-to-enrolment ratios, and the same reason our throughput and dropout figures insist on naming the cohort. A ratio is only as good as the sentence you wrap around it.

Who South Africa’s academics are

The distribution changes sharply by category. DHET reports that the majority of African and Coloured permanent staff were employed as administrative staff, while more than half of White permanent staff — 6 837 of 12 088 — were in the instruction and research category. Across the system, black staff members (African, Indian/Asian and Coloured combined) held 99.5% of service posts, 84.2% of administrative posts and 65.4% of instruction and research posts.

Within the academic category the institutional spread is wide. DHET names the universities where black academic staff made up less than half of instruction and research staff in 2024 — Stellenbosch (33.5%), Pretoria (43.2%), the Free State (45.4%), North West (47.2%) and Cape Town (49.4%) — and those above 90%: Venda (97.3%), Mangosuthu (97.1%), Walter Sisulu (95.5%), Limpopo (94.2%), Sefako Makgatho (91.0%), Mpumalanga (90.9%) and Zululand (90.6%).

Where the staff are

Permanent staff are concentrated in the same places students are, but not in the same proportions. The largest permanent staff complements in 2024 were at the University of South Africa (5 771, or 8.8% of all permanent university staff), the University of the Witwatersrand (4 840, 7.4%), the University of Cape Town (4 777, 7.3%) and the University of Johannesburg (4 676, 7.1%). The smallest were at Mangosuthu University of Technology (615, 0.9%), the University of Mpumalanga (649, 1.0%) and Sol Plaatje University (651, 1.0%).

Set that against enrolment growth and the pressure becomes visible. Total public university enrolment rose 4.1% in 2024 — an extra 43 865 students on 2023’s 1 071 715 — while permanent staff numbers fell by 0.5%. Students up, permanent staff slightly down, in the same year. If you are weighing an open-distance institution against a contact one, our comparison of Unisa and contact universities is where the supervision-model difference is worked through.

What this means when your supervisor goes quiet

The most common complaint on this site, by a distance, is a supervisor who takes weeks to return a chapter. These figures do not excuse that, but they do explain the environment it happens in: a permanent academic staff body that shrank slightly while enrolment grew by more than forty thousand, carrying teaching, administration, their own research output targets and postgraduate supervision at the same time.

Two practical consequences follow. First, the chapter you send should be one your supervisor can respond to in a single sitting — a focused draft with a specific question attached gets returned faster than eighty unstructured pages. Second, silence is usually load, not judgement, and it needs a procedure rather than an interpretation. Our guide to a supervisor who is not returning your chapter sets out the escalation ladder in order, and the system for writing around a full-time job is built to keep you moving during the wait.

How to cite these figures

1. Cite the publication, not the department’s home page. The author is the Department of Higher Education and Training; the work is Statistics on Post-School Education and Training in South Africa, 2024. Our Harvard and APA guide for South African universities covers how a government publication is formatted in each.
2. Give the table number. Staff figures are Table 4.8. An examiner who wants to check you should not have to search 130 pages.
3. Give the extraction date. “2024 HEMIS database, data extracted in October 2025” is part of the provenance, and it explains why 2024 data is the newest available to a 2026 writer.
4. Carry the permanence caveat with the number. If you write “there are 20 887 academics in South Africa” without it, you have overstated a limitation into a fact.
5. Do not convert the ratio into a supervision claim. “4.3 postgraduate candidates per permanent academic” is defensible; “the average supervisor has 4.3 students” is not.

Frequently asked questions

How many academics work at South African universities?

20 887 permanent instruction and research staff were employed at South Africa’s 26 public universities in 2024, according to DHET’s Statistics on Post-School Education and Training in South Africa, 2024. Academics on fixed-term or part-time contracts are not included in that figure.

What is the student-to-staff ratio at South African universities?

Dividing 1 115 580 enrolled students by 20 887 permanent academic staff gives 53.4 students per permanent academic in 2024. This is a headcount ratio, not a full-time-equivalent planning ratio, and it excludes contract staff.

How many postgraduate students are there per academic?

90 010 master’s and doctoral students were enrolled in 2024 against 20 887 permanent academics — about 4.3 research candidates per permanent academic. Actual supervision loads vary enormously, because many academics supervise none and some supervise more than ten.

Are there more administrators than academics at South African universities?

Among permanent staff, yes. In 2024 there were 33 366 permanent administrative staff against 20 887 permanent instruction and research staff — roughly 1.6 to 1. Note that DHET’s administrative category includes all executive, professional, technical and office staff who spend less than half their time on instruction and research.

Is university staffing in South Africa growing?

No. Permanent staff numbers fell 0.5% (358 people) between 2023 and 2024, from 65 943 to 65 585, while student enrolment rose 4.1% over the same period.

What counts as “permanent” staff in these statistics?

DHET defines a permanent staff member as an employee who contributes to an institutional pension or retirement fund. Contract, part-time and post-doctoral appointments fall outside the count.

Which university employs the most staff?

The University of South Africa, with 5 771 permanent staff (8.8% of the national total), followed by Wits (4 840), the University of Cape Town (4 777) and the University of Johannesburg (4 676).

Does this data tell me how many supervisors have doctorates?

No. This publication reports staff by personnel category, population group and gender, but not by highest qualification. We looked for a qualification breakdown in the 2024 edition and did not find one; do not infer supervision capacity from these tables.

Where can I get the report myself?

The Department of Higher Education and Training publishes the Statistics on Post-School Education and Training series as a free PDF on its own website. Work from the PDF rather than a news summary — summaries of this series routinely drop the “permanent” qualifier, which changes what the staff number means.

The numbers explain the wait. They do not finish the chapter.

Knowing that your supervisor sits inside a permanent academic body of 20 887 people serving over a million students makes the delay easier to understand. It does not move your submission date. What moves your submission date is arriving at each supervision meeting with a structured draft rather than a blank document — and that part is inside your control. Tesify helps you draft, structure and reference your dissertation while keeping every word your own. If you are at the very start, our step-by-step honours research report guide is the place to begin.

Start your dissertation with Tesify