Grant Cyster says managing full-time employment and his PhD at the same time was challenging, requiring self-discipline and sacrifice. Image: Shelley Christians/UWCWhen financial constraints forced Dr Grant Cyster to leave university after just a year of study in the mid-1990s, his dreams of earning a degree seemed to fade away.
Despite his determination to pursue a Bachelor of Arts degree and a successful career as a communications specialist – with his work featured in magazines and other national media outlets, including a stint in the United States – doors to higher education always seemed beyond reach.
However, an informal conversation with a colleague that took place about three years after he joined the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in 2013 as an online editor introduced him to the Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) programme. This turning point transformed his life.
RPL is a programme implemented at various universities that formally acknowledges the skills and competencies of individuals gained through professional work experience, and not only through traditional education.
South African public universities use this programme to grant credit towards a formal academic qualification to mature students aged 23 years and older, who are seeking alternative access into higher education degree programmes. Through this opportunity, Dr Cyster not only earned his Master of Arts degree at UWC in 2019 – more than two decades after his first attempt at university – but also went on to accomplish what he once thought was unattainable: a PhD in Education at Rhodes University in 2025.
It was a journey, he said, that tested his grit, perseverance, and the very strength of his character – something doctoral education tends to do in general, he asserts. Managing full-time employment while pursuing doctoral research presented significant challenges requiring self-discipline and sacrifice.
“I derived a lot of strength from God, and through the grace that he's given me, I was able to pull through. But there were certainly times when I thought: ‘Why the hell am I doing this…is this even worth it?’ Numerous times I grappled with the temptation to give up, but you reach the point where you've swam past the halfway mark, and it's going to cost as much or more sacrifice to go back as it would to go forward, so you just tell yourself you might as well plough ahead and hope for the best.”
Getting into the Master’s programme was a “huge blessing, albeit after and leading to a long arduous journey of hitting brick walls and closed doors, but eventually the right opportunity came along”. One of the “closed door” experiences for Dr Cyster was when he did not complete his initial Master’s programme in education at UWC after encountering supervisory and departmental challenges that proved too overwhelming to navigate. He believes that even the hurdles that he faced provided valuable lessons.
“That experience was not wasted; instead, it prepared me for and motivated my Master of Arts research,” he explained.
Although it was disappointing not to complete the education programme, it was that experience that sparked the research interest that Dr Cyster carried through into his doctoral study, which focused on the impact of doctoral supervision and associated institutional factors on student success and dropout rates.
Dr Cyster believes that expanding access to higher education through RPL, for a skilled workforce that hasn’t had the opportunity in life to access it, plays a crucial role in promoting social justice. It does so by offering education opportunities to people who, due to circumstances beyond their control, never had the chance to pursue formal study.
“It helps to level the playing field to a degree, and it gives individuals who might never have entertained dreams or aspirations of studying further the chance to access higher education,” he said.
@uwconline From setback to success, Dr Grant Cyster’s journey reminds us that education may pause, but dreams never expire #IAmUWC ? original sound - University of the Western Cape
