Addiction Is Threatening Student Success. How Should Social Investment Respond?

By Suzan Mususumeli Ramudzuli, Social Investment Specialist at Tshikululu Social Investments

Youth Month is a time to reflect on the aspirations, opportunities, and future of our youth. In June, we celebrate progress, acknowledge challenges, and consider what must be done to ensure that young people realise their full potential.

Over the past three decades, we’ve seen significant investments in expanding access to basic education, improving participation in higher education, and strengthening pathways to employment and economic inclusion. These efforts stem from a shared recognition that South Africa’s future depends, in large part, on the success of its young people.

Higher education occupies a particularly important place in this agenda. For many students, a qualification represents far more than academic achievement. It’s a gateway to social mobility, economic opportunity, and a promising future.

We’ve made progress toward making promising futures possible, but we cannot ignore the persistent issues threatening to undermine it.

Despite cross-sector investment in tertiary education, we still haven’t moved the needle. According to the Council on Higher Education’s most recent cohort data, 38% of students who began three-year degrees at South African public and private institutions in 2016 had not graduated within five years. This is, in part, because many young people continue to navigate a complex set of social, economic, and personal challenges creating barriers to success.

The legacies of inequality, poverty, unemployment, and social exclusion continue to impact learning and development. They add another layer of difficulty to an already fraught environment in which students are expected to build their futures. They influence how students respond to this pressure, navigate uncertainty, and work towards graduation. They can make or break academic achievement and they are deeply entrenched.

In 2025, Tshikululu Social Investments published Beyond Access: Reimagining Student Success as a Systemic Imperative. The paper details how these realities operate. It examines the broad set of academic, social, financial, institutional, and environmental factors shaping South Africa’s education landscape. It sets out to answer the question: in this environment, can students ultimately, seize the opportunities that higher education promises?”

The publication came at a critical time, as institutions, funders, and policymakers figure out the most impactful ways to invest in improving student outcomes. Significant resources have been directed towards strengthening academic support, financial aid, student wellbeing, accommodation, mental health services, and student development initiatives. These investments have undoubtedly strengthened the student success ecosystem. However, to achieve tangible impact, we must also look at whether these efforts are addressing the full picture: not just these individual factors, but the often invisible way they interact to enable or undermine student success

This dilemma sits at the heart of the second paper in our Rethinking Student Success series. Addiction, Wellbeing and Hidden Risks in Higher Education, developed by Tshikululu Social Investments and Thrive Student Living, uses addiction as a lens to explore broader challenges facing the higher education sector.

Addiction is primarily viewed as a health, behavioural, or disciplinary issue and frequently left out of conversations around student success. In this paper we argue that addiction should be foregrounded as an issue affecting many of the outcomes that institutions, funders, and policymakers seek to improve. The paper touches on core elements shaping student success including wellbeing, financial stability, academic engagement, retention, and long-term educational outcomes. It unpacks how addiction can both underpin, and bring attention to these issues as barriers to success.

Concerns around substance abuse, gambling, digital dependency, and other compulsive behaviours invite us to ask difficult questions about stress, loneliness, financial pressure, mental wellbeing, belonging, and how students cope with adversity and uncertainty. Viewed in this way, addiction is more than a behavioural issue. It is a signal that points towards conditions that undermine student success. It brings these issues to the fore long before they become visible through traditional measures of performance, like dropout rates. This is what makes addiction a useful lens. It is one of the few indicators that brings these pressures surface together, in a form institutions can actually see.

For investors, the challenge is not only treating addiction as a behavioural or health issue. It is understanding and targeting the hidden realities that cause addiction in the first place.

This is precisely why Tshikululu views student success as a systemic issue. Academic performance, wellbeing, financial security, belonging, mental health, family circumstances, accommodation, and access to support do not operate independently of one another. Understanding how these realities intersect is essential for us to strengthen outcomes and ensure that investments in higher education achieve their intended impact.

Viewing these issues as interconnected allows us to create integrated programmes that enable students to convert opportunity into success. Using addiction as a lens through which we unpack these issues gives us a starting point to unearthing the invisible factors shaping students’ lives. To ensure tangible impact and student success, we must tackle these invisible factors and their cascading effects first. If students have access to opportunity without the support needed to fully embrace it, social investment can only go so far.

As South Africa reflects on the future of its youth, there is value in looking beyond the outcomes we measure and paying closer attention to the realities that shape those outcomes.  This is the primary issue explored in our upcoming paper Rethinking Student Success: Addiction, Wellbeing and Hidden Risks in Higher Education.

Because if we are serious about using social investment to strengthen student success, we need to pay closer attention to the invisible influences that undermine our efforts.

Rethinking Student Success: Addiction, Wellbeing and Hidden Risks in Higher Education will be available on  www.tshikululu.org.za later this month.

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