About Us
Learn about the vision and mission that drives the work we do and the history of the access programmes at UKZN.
Learn about the vision and mission that drives the work we do and the history of the access programmes at UKZN.
The vision of CASSE is to be an Access Centre of Excellence, whose mission is to provide higher education access to all students who have the aptitude to succeed in a Science and Engineering degree, but have not gained entry into these degrees via the stipulated selection process, and to equip them with the tools needed for success in the fields of Science and Engineering.
The purpose of CASSE within the College is to provide access to higher education for students from socio-economically deprived backgrounds, and who attended schools without the proper resources and infrastructure to put them on a level playing field with students who attended better resourced schools. These resources include well stocked libraries, laboratories and qualified teachers to effectively teach the science subjects.
This purpose aligns with the University’s mission ideals which are to be the Premier University of African Scholarship and to become a truly South African university that is academically excellent, innovative in research, critically engaged with society and demographically representative, to redress the disadvantages, inequalities and imbalances of the past.
The University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) was born in 2004 by the merger of the University of Natal (1910) and the University of Durban-Westville (UDW, 1960), giving rise to one of the largest residential universities in South Africa. Since then, UKZN has swiftly established itself as one of the leading universities on the African continent in terms of academic quality and research impact and, consequently, has consistently featured in global university rankings over the last seven years.
Both progenitor universities had a long history of Access Programmes in both Science and Engineering. The UNITE Engineering Access Programme started in 1988 at the University of Natal, Howard College campus, and the Engineering Bridging Programme at the University of Durban-Westville, in 1993. In Science, the University of Natal, Howard College campus, started their Augmented Science programme in 1991, while both the University of Durban-Westville (1999) and the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg campus (1991) offered Science Foundation Programmes.
Drawing on the nearly thirty years of experience in Access Programmes, the College of Agriculture, Engineering and Science (CAES) at UKZN offers two Access Programmes, namely, the Engineering Access Programme (EAP) on the Howard College Campus, and the Science Access Programme (SAP) on both the Westville and Pietermaritzburg campuses. The structure of these Programmes in terms of curriculum development and student support, is derived from the expertise developed over the long history of Access Programmes at UKZN.