Parliament has told the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) to get its house order and gave it two weeks to report on a date for the conclusion of all appeals.

A Cape Times report says the Portfolio Committee On Higher Education slammed the board members led by chairperson Ernest Khosa over appeal responses that are still outstanding.

During a briefing yesterday, MPs expressed disappointment that more than 14 000 eligible students were wrongly defunded, leading to chaos in the sector.

NSFAS received a total of 2 142 888 funding applications for both new and continuing students.

‘It has been identified that there were 45 927 records that were funded and later unfunded because of processing gaps. Hybrid applications affected 14 703 records where continuing students applied erroneously because of migrating from the old to the new system. In some instances, it was students panicking because they did not see their funding statuses and applied for funding,’ said acting CEO Masile Ramorwesi.

He said they were correcting this, and all the unjustly rejected students would now be funded.

NSFAS also received 170 683 financial and academic eligibility appeals, 58 924 were funded and 6 337 applicants were rejected.

‘There are 28 971 appeals that were deemed invalid, and these consist of withdrawn, deleted and duplicated appeals. A total of 44 561 appeals are dependent on institutions to load results as well as applicants to upload missing information. There are also appeals in progress that need system dependency (7 927) and human dependency (23 963),’ said Ramorwesi.

Full Cape Times report