In Conversation with Zanele Maduna

As the cost of living rises and student funding remains under pressure, juggling work, academics and personal survival has become a structural reality for many university students. Increasingly, academic success is shaped not only by intelligence or discipline, but by access to food, time, mental health support, and reliable income. For working-class and first-generation students in particular, university is less a sheltered space for learning and more a daily negotiation between survival and performance.

While institutions often emphasise individual resilience, this framing obscures the deeper inequalities that shape who can afford to “focus” on their studies and who cannot. Without intentional support systems, students are pushed into burnout, academic exclusion, or silent withdrawal.