NSFAS 2025 deadline is here, apply before it’s too late
Bursary Description
- Hopeful students have just three days to apply to NSFAS for financial support in the 2025 academic year.
- Higher Education Minister Nobuhle Nkabane has reminded students to apply as she and her department get the embattled scheme up to fighting shape.
- This is a tall task, especially as more than 1.2 million beneficiaries are expected next year.
After a dreadul 2023 and 2024, the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) is being prepared to tackle the 2025 academic year. This means that time is quickly running out and the NSFAS applications deadline of 15th December 2024 is upon us.
Applications will close on midnight, so that means 14 December is the final day to apply.
Hopeful applicants now have three days before applications for the 2025 academic year close and are unable to apply for financial aid from NSFAS until the 2026 application period opens, usually around September.
The Minister for Higher Education and Training Nobuhle Nkabane reminded students that the period is rapidly closing and to apply to avoid disappointments.
“Let me remind everyone that we are moving towards the closing date of the NSFAS application process for the 2025 academic year,” said Nkabane on Tuesday.
“The NSFAS application [period] is closing on 15 December 2024. Apply while there is still time to avoid any disappointments.”
How to apply to NSFAS for the 2025 academic year
Concern as NSFAS heads into 2025
Nkabane has a huge task ahead of her. Of the many government entities, few with billion-rand budgets are as complex and riddled with deficiencies as NSFAS. In the last two years alone the scheme has faced setback after setback, leading to millions upon millions of squandered Rands and thousands of unpaid students left stranded.
The minister herself said in October that she believes that the current situation around NSFAS and its existing infrastructure capacity would mean that it is impossible for the department to deliver according to its mandate.
“There is no way we can deliver in terms of our constitutional obligation,” she said at the time.
The minister’s plan is to make the scheme more accessible.
“Our priority is to increase access to all parts of the country, with NSFAS presence on all campuses at the beginning of the academic year,” she said this week.
“We have started the process of regionalisation to ensure that we expand access to everyone, and no one must be left behind.”
But it must do more in terms of its digital infrastructure, especially as more students than ever will be supported by its finances next year.
Freeman Nomvalo, administrator installed by previous higher education minister Blade Nzimande to keep the embattled scheme from collapsing earlier this year told Parliament that NSFAS’s old ICT systems allow mismanagement and make it especially vulnerable to cyberattack.
NSFAS had a budget of R52 billion for 2024.
The former accountant-general said that the student financial scheme does not possess credible student data, potentially an enormous problem for the scheme.
“The committee recommend that NSFAS needs to ensure that it strengthens its ICT systems as a matter of urgency to curb student data falling into the wrong hands,” wrote the Parliament of South Africa in a release earlier this year.
For the 2025 academic year, NSFAS expects to be supporting more than 1.2 million students financially.