JOHANNESBURG — Last Wednesday, I arrived at the University of the Witwatersrand, where I work, and couldn’t get inside. Some major entrances to the campus in the center of Johannesburg were locked. Others had been barricaded by students. The university had expected a docile, two-hour protest; instead, a week before exams, the campus was shut down by a crowd of 2,000. It’s been closed ever since.

Students at Wits, as it’s known locally, are protesting because the poor are being priced out of higher education. For many of them, getting into a university is a triumph; but staying there is a miracle.

Neither universities nor the government are doing nearly enough to help poor (which generally means black) students survive and graduate. The original impetus for the protests was a proposed 10.5-percent fee increase that would have locked some students out for life. A 10,000-rand (about $750) up-front fee would have prevented many existing students from registering and caused them to lose access to whatever funding or scholarships they had. In just one week, student demands evolved from canceling fee increases at Wits to a government commitment to publicly funded higher education (the government studied such a reform in 2012 but never released its findings to the public).

On Friday President Jacob Zuma announced that there would be no fee increases in 2016. This is a significant victory but it’s only the start of a larger struggle. The government has not committed to cover the shortfalls that universities will face or explained how it plans to fund higher education in the longer term. On Saturday, Wits students voted to continue the shutdown until the government addresses their demand for free education.