The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) has provisionally funded more than 600,000 students for the 2025 academic year. While these students met the eligibility criteria for funding, the government bursary scheme requires additional information before students are fully funded.
This was revealed during a recent National Council of Provinces Committee (NCOP) Education, Sciences and Creative Industries meeting.
NSFAS provides comprehensive bursaries and student loans to deserving students enrolled in approved academic programmes. This funding covers tuition and registration fees with students also receiving several allowances for food, accommodation, and learning materials.
A total of 890 000 bursary applications were received by NSFAS for the 2025 academic year. The scheme also received 17 369 loan applications.
NSFAS has provisionally funded 607 564 applicants. However, these students will only begin benefiting from NSFAS funding once their registration data is submitted to NSFAS.
They confirmed that 243 690 applicants are fully funded, and NSFAS has received their registration information from their institutions.
The scheme rejected 97 375 applications from students who did not meet the eligibility criteria for funding. 75 294 appeals were lodged by unsuccessful applicants indicating a significant number of applicants are contesting their rejection.
NSFAS revealed that 733 403 of the 2025 applicants were beneficiaries of South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) grants. Of these 703 615 students were approved for funding.
Sassa grant beneficiaries receive immediate funding decisions from NSFAS as they meet the financial eligibility criteria for bursaries. However, NSFAS reported that 14,291 applications from Sassa beneficiaries were cancelled and 12,746 applications were rejected as applicants did not meet the academic eligibility criteria.
NSFAS applicants who do not benefit from Sassa grants are subjected to several extra checks to assess their financial eligibility. To qualify for a NSFAS bursary, the applicant must come from a home with a household income not exceeding R350,000.
The government bursary scheme confirmed that 146,961 non-Sassa students are provisionally funded for the 2025 academic year.287,977 non-Sassa applications have been reviewed for verification purposes.
The verification process for non-Sassa applications appears to be a bottleneck as a large number of applicants are required to submit additional documents to NSFAS to prove their eligibility. At least 28,345 non-Sassa grant applicants must submit additional documents.
