South African Postgraduate Enrolment Statistics: The Latest National Figures (2026 Update)

85 770 students were enrolled for a master’s or doctoral degree at a South African public university in 2023, and 17 439 master’s and doctoral qualifications were awarded in the same year.

Every figure on this page comes from one document: the Department of Higher Education and Training’s Statistics on Post-School Education and Training in South Africa, 2023, drawn from the 2023 HEMIS database with data extracted in November 2024. That is the most recent full national release, so a 2026 reader is working with 2023 data — which is normal for this series, and worth saying plainly in your own literature review rather than implying the numbers are current-year.

How big is the postgraduate cohort?

Master’s and doctoral students together are 8.0% of everyone enrolled at a South African public university. If your department feels small, that is why. Postgraduate research is a minority activity inside a system that is overwhelmingly undergraduate: undergraduate degrees alone accounted for 591 770 enrolments and undergraduate certificates and diplomas for a further 276 163.

The number that gets misused most

Divide 13 819 master’s graduates by 60 295 master’s enrolments and you get 22.9%. Do the same at doctoral level and you get 14.2%.

Neither of those is a completion rate, and you should not present them as one. They compare graduates in a single year against everyone enrolled in that same year, including students in their first month. A genuine completion or throughput rate follows one cohort across several years. If a source hands you a percentage in this shape and calls it a completion rate, it has made an error you do not want to repeat in an examined document.

What the ratio does tell you honestly is the shape of the system: the pool of registered postgraduates is roughly four to seven times larger than the number finishing in any given year, because these degrees take years and many students are studying part-time.

South African postgraduates are older than you think

Add the rows from 30 upward and the picture is unambiguous. 33 363 master’s students — 55.3% of the total — are 30 or older. At doctoral level it is 20 707 students, or 81.3%. The single largest doctoral age band is 30–39, and more doctoral candidates are over 50 than are under 25.

This is the statistic to reach for when a supervisor, a funder or a family member frames your studies as though you were a full-time twenty-two-year-old. You are in the majority, not the exception. The Council on Higher Education’s 2018 Qualification Standard for Doctoral Degrees makes the same point from the institutional side, noting — citing Cloete and colleagues’ 2015 work — that 60% of doctoral candidates at South African institutions study part-time, and that this has a direct impact on throughput.

It also has a funding consequence that catches people out. The main NRF postgraduate scholarship scheme supports full-time study at public universities — which is precisely not the route most of this cohort is taking.

Where postgraduates actually study

Almost a third of all public university students in South Africa — 32.7%, or 350 407 people — are registered at the University of South Africa. Tshwane University of Technology follows at 5.6% (60 134), then North West University at 5.1% (55 096), the University of Pretoria at 5.0% (53 911) and the University of Johannesburg at 5.0% (53 564). The smallest enrolment was at Sol Plaatje University, with 4 482 students.

But institutional dominance does not carry evenly across levels, and this is where the national picture gets genuinely useful:

• Doctoral enrolment — Unisa has the highest of any institution, at 3 164.
• Master’s enrolment — Unisa does not lead. The University of the Witwatersrand has the highest master’s enrolment at 7 899, followed by the University of Pretoria (6 220) and the University of Cape Town (5 981).
• Master’s graduates — the University of Pretoria produced the most (1 956, or 14.2% of all master’s graduates), then Wits (1 868, 13.5%) and Stellenbosch (1 551, 11.2%).
• All graduates — Unisa produced 25.6% of the country’s 220 758 graduates, or 56 549 people.

If you are choosing where to register, that spread matters more than a headline enrolment number, because it shows where supervision capacity at your level is concentrated rather than where the most students are. It also cuts differently depending on which qualification level you are entering: the institution with the country’s largest doctoral cohort is not among the top three for master’s.

Contact and distance study, and which one is growing

Of the 1 071 715 students in public institutions in 2023, 700 123 (65.3%) studied through contact mode and 371 592 (34.7%) through distance mode — a gap of 328 531 students. Unisa, which offers its courses exclusively at a distance, accounted for 94.3% of all distance enrolments in the country.

The year-on-year movement is worth noting because it runs against the assumption that online study is sweeping the sector. Total public enrolment fell by 0.6% (6 053 students) from the 2022 figure of 1 077 768. That decline was driven entirely by distance study, which dropped 2.9% (11 221 students), while contact enrolment rose slightly by 0.7% (5 168). Over the longer 2010–2023 window the same asymmetry holds: contact enrolment grew 28.3% (154 364) against 7.0% (24 415) for distance.

Graduate output is down slightly

The 220 758 graduates produced in 2023 were 2.2% (4 944) fewer than the 225 702 reported in 2022 — though still 51.8% (75 332) more than the 153 325 recorded in 2010. Doctoral graduates specifically fell by 1.9%, from 3 690 to 3 620, a decrease of 70 people.

Seventy doctorates is a small enough number that a single institution having a slow examination year can move it. Treat one-year movements in doctoral output as noise unless you can show a trend; treat the thirteen-year growth as the real signal.

How to use these figures in your own dissertation

1. Name the publication, not the website. Cite Statistics on Post-School Education and Training in South Africa, 2023 and the Department of Higher Education and Training as author — not “DHET website”. Our guide to Harvard and APA at South African universities covers how to format a government publication in each.
2. Give the data year and the extraction date. “2023 HEMIS database, data extracted in November 2024” is part of the provenance, and examiners notice when it is missing.
3. Say when a figure is the latest available rather than current. Writing in 2026 from 2023 data is entirely defensible; implying it is 2026 data is not.
4. Check your arithmetic against the published totals. Every table above reconciles: 97 927 + 51 519 + 35 211 + 13 819 + 3 620 + 18 662 = 220 758 exactly, and the distance decline of 11 221 minus the contact gain of 5 168 gives the published net fall of 6 053. If your derived figures do not add up to the source’s own totals, you have misread a column.
5. Do not invent precision. Where no national dataset exists — plagiarism cases, for instance, are not published as a national series — say so instead of estimating.

Frequently asked questions

How many master’s students are there in South Africa?

60 295 students were enrolled for master’s degrees at public higher education institutions in 2023, according to DHET’s Statistics on Post-School Education and Training in South Africa, 2023.

How many doctoral students are there in South Africa?

25 475 students were enrolled for doctoral degrees at public higher education institutions in 2023, and 3 620 doctoral qualifications were awarded that year.

What is the postgraduate completion rate in South Africa?

This publication does not report a cohort completion rate. Graduates in a year divided by enrolments in the same year gives 22.9% at master’s level and 14.2% at doctoral level, but that is a graduate-to-enrolment ratio, not a completion rate, and should not be described as one.

Which university has the most postgraduate students?

Unisa has the largest doctoral enrolment (3 164) and the largest total enrolment overall (350 407). At master’s level the largest enrolment is at the University of the Witwatersrand (7 899), followed by the University of Pretoria (6 220) and the University of Cape Town (5 981).

How old is the average South African postgraduate?

The publication reports age bands rather than an average. 55.3% of master’s students and 81.3% of doctoral students are 30 or older, and the largest single doctoral band is 30–39 years.

How many students are in South African higher education overall?

1 358 169 in 2023 — 1 071 715 (78.9%) at public institutions and 286 454 (21.1%) at private institutions.

Is enrolment growing or shrinking?

Public higher education enrolment fell 0.6% (6 053 students) between 2022 and 2023, driven by a 2.9% decline in distance study. Contact enrolment rose 0.7% over the same period.

How many students study by distance in South Africa?

371 592 students, or 34.7% of public enrolment, studied in distance mode in 2023. Unisa accounted for 94.3% of those.

Where can I find these statistics myself?

The Department of Higher Education and Training publishes the Statistics on Post-School Education and Training series, along with an accompanying infographics document, on its own website. Always work from the PDF rather than a secondary summary — summaries of this series frequently drop the year or the mode qualifier and change what the number means.

Numbers are the easy part

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