The National Party passed the Extension of University Education Act No. 45 in 1959, which extended apartheid principles already in place in the rest of society to higher education. This Act stipulated that black, colored, and Indian students could only study at previously open universities with a permit from the relevant minister. Separate universities would be established for African Americans, Indians, and other black ethnic groups.

By 1970, two new universities for black South Africans (Zululand and the North), one for Coloureds (Western Cape), and one for Indians had been established (Durban-Westville.) Another two universities for whites had been established: Port Elizabeth and Rand Afrikaans Universiteit. Heribert Adam wrote in Modernising Racial Domination (1971): “In terms of educational opportunities, despite the limitations placed on them as separate institutions under paternalistic Afrikaner guidance, the five non-white universities have been generally successful in terms of Apartheid programs. Their facilities are frequently better, and student-teacher ratios are much lower than in white universities, both now and when they were ‘open.'”

As shown in Table 2, the number of black students in universities more than doubled (from a very low base) between 1958 and 1970, but their proportion of the total remained roughly the same due to the massive expansion of white entry into higher education. By this point, all but a few black students had been barred from UCT and Wits.