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This article reviews demographic shifts in access to higher education in South Africa from the late 1 980s onwards before going on to look at the extent to which black South Africans have benefitted from those shifts. In the context of analyses which show that black South Africans experience less success in the higher education system than their white peers, the paper argues that dominant understandings of what is needed to succeed are inadequate in explaining the data. In opposition to dominant understandings, the paper goes on to propose that only 'social' accounts of learning allow us to make sense of black students' experiences. At the same time, however, resilience of dominant accounts is acknowledged.
