The higher education & training department does not have a firm handle on the role foreign nationals play at universities as the data provided by institutions is incomplete, parliament heard on Wednesday. The data gap heightens the pressure facing universities from parliament, which has for months been demanding tertiary education institutions defend their hiring practices. The portfolio committee on higher education & training has suggested some institutions are not following due process and that South Africans are being crowded out by foreigners.University hiring practices are governed by the Employment Services Act, which regulates the employment of foreign nationals. The act strives to balance South Africa’s skills needs against the protection of local employment and requires employers to demonstrate that a suitably qualified South African or permanent resident is unavailable before hiring a foreign national.Referring to a meeting held with UCT earlier this month, committee chair Tebogo Letsie said it was “extremely worrying” that the institution had more foreign professors on its staff than all its black, coloured and Indian professors combined. UCT told parliament on June 10 that while foreign nationals constituted just 4.5% of its workforce, 39% of its professors were foreign nationals and 40% were white South Africans. A similar pattern was evident at the universities of Pretoria, Free State and Venda, Letsie said.“This is not xenophobia. If this was 20 years ago we would understand, because that is when the government introduced the NRF [National Research Foundation] to close this gap,” he said. The NRF provides grants and bursaries to post-graduate students and early-career scientists and has played a central role in the government’s efforts to increase the number of black PhD graduates.At the committee’s request, the higher education & training department had collated personnel data from South Africa’s 26 universities, but the records were incomplete, deputy director-general for universities Thandi Lewin said.Permanent residence and critical skills visa information was missing for large numbers of personnel, she said.The available data indicated strong African representation among the foreign hires at universities, with more than a quarter (27%) from Zimbabwe and 14% from Nigeria, she said. She emphasised that attracting top international academic talent was an important aspect of universities’ efforts to enhance research output and was a deliberate effort to build intellectual capital.She said the department planned to reconfigure the Higher Education Management Information System to ensure it captured accurate data on the nationality of staff employed in the sector.Higher education institutions will in the future be required to provide information on the nationality, citizenship and visa status of their employees, higher education & training minister Buti Manamela said. Accurate data was a prerequisite for an honest debate on the role of foreign talent at universities, he said. The department was setting up a joint task team with the department of home affairs and Universities South Africa to clear the visa backlog and tighten compliance, he said. It had appointed a 19-member advisory panel of internationalisation experts to develop a standardised framework defining approved visa pathways, skills-transfer obligations and employment-equity expectations.Universities will also be required to account for how they balance internationalisation with transformation in their annual performance plans, Manamela said.