Both Sides Archive

Free Education Benefits Society

 

Tertiary education should be a right for all New Zealanders, not a privilege that can be brought and sold.

Fees are having many different and varied effects. Research has shown that high fees are discouraging students of low social-economical backgrounds from obtaining a tertiary education. This is especially relevant for Maori and Pacific Island people.

Loans are no solution to this problem. Fees form over 60 percent of the present seven billion dollar student debt burden.

This debt burden is driving graduates overseas, they are putting off having children, many are unwilling to risk a home mortgage on top of their student debt and a number are deciding not to go onto postgraduate study because of their student loan burden.

All these issues have negative repercussions for our society, which are becoming more and more evident.

People often question why tertiary education should be free when the person who obtains this education supposedly obtains a personal benefit from it. No-one questions the obvious benefits to New Zealand society of having a fully-funded primary and secondary education system, because having a literate, knowledgeable, critically thinking population is of obvious benefit to us all. The same could be said of tertiary graduates, the more tertiary graduates we have the richer our society is for it.

As well as this, many graduates are paid little more than average wage, so where is the benefit in paying fees and graduating if one could instead walk from secondary education into workforce and avoid a student loan. This is especially true in core public services areas such as nursing, social workers and teachers. These students are trained for work that is, at its essence, a public good and we expect them to pay for the privilege?

We should also not exclude students who train for careers in business, design, science etc because they too are contributing to the social and economic status of our country.

One major argument used for the introduction of fees was that the quality of education would improve as the different providers competed for students by working to provide the highest quality education. Instead we have seen over the last several years that instead of competing on quality, there has instead been a trend to pour more and more money into marketing to sell the perception of the quality instead of the reality.

Staff/student ratios and staff salaries were far better when tertiary education was fully funded by Government. This was because the source of funding was far more secure and there was more of an obligation on the Government to fund tertiary education properly. Now under our fees regime, the Government gets away with under-funding tertiary education and forces the universities, polytechnics and other such tertiary education institutes to increase fees to cover their costs.

This experiment in user pays has failed; the fall-out from fees and related student debt is hurting our country. The current system is discouraging people from tertiary education, impacting negatively on our graduates in a multitude of ways, student debts is being passed from graduates onto the consumers in the form of higher costs.

Our supposedly quality institutes are slowly becoming less and less sound. We as a country must demand a return to a full funded education system not only for the good of students but for the good of our entire society.