The government wants you to study. Its way. Full time, with special attention if you are young and Maori. Preferably in a course that will get you a job. In New Zealand. On a high tax rate. Immediately after your study finishes. So don’t study Zoology. You can get a student loan – and if the Treasury gets its way, you’ll be paying interest on that loan.
You really have to wonder, in its Briefing to the Incoming Minister(BIM) released today , why Treasury bothered to recommend reintroduction of interest on student loans when the Finance Minister rejects it the day the briefings become public. In its BIM, Treasury also recommended “greater targeting towards younger tertiary students, and higher-level qualifications.”
Briefings by the Tertiary Education Commission and the Ministry of Education ( Also here) were released today also. It is clear that the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC), through the government’s Tertiary Education Strategy, is focussing on outcomes to increasingly drive behaviour and influence students away from part time and extramural study – and towards vocational rather than academic study. The TEC also states that enabling Maori and Pacific students to succeed at higher levels is critical to improving their economic and social wellbeing, yet many of those students are not part of the target group, that is, those who are school leavers and want to study full time.
One of the main challenges in tertiary education internationally is finding the balance between governmental steering and institutional autonomy in governance arrangements that respond to external expectations and our Government has yet to get that right. Resource constraints inevitably lead to tradeoffs and older students who want to study part time are being traded off. Other students are missing out altogether as the tertiary sector is so underfunded that it cannot respond to the demands of students. This results in perverse incentives that limit access to priority learner groups such as Maori and Pacific Islanders.
The Ministry of Education, in its briefing, noted that it is important to maintain entry to high-quality tertiary education options for second chance learners – but these are not adults who are retraining, be it part time or full time, these learner s are defined as ‘learners who have fallen out of the education system without gaining a meaningful qualification, or core literacy and numeracy skills – i.e. people who will struggle in doing a degree and instead go to lower level tertiary education, and come out of that wanting to do a degree because they can’t get a job with their new qualification.
The Ministry also noted that there is a risk that a focus on performance at provider level provides relatively weak incentives for providers to improve completion, retention and progression rates for priority groups. It may instead adversely affect tertiary education organisation serving a higher proportion of Maori and Pasifika learners, or encourage provider to make admissions criteria more restrictive, limiting access to learners – such as extramural students – perceived to be high risk.
Which is exactly what Massey is doing at the moment – it is forced to limit the number of part time extramural students – including students from from priority areas – as the focus is on full time youth. While the Ministry of Education says that limited access is a risk, it is not a big deal for the Tertiary Education Commission, who, through the governments Tertiary Education Strategy, forces institutions like Massey to limit access to tertiary education for target groups through disincentivising or limiting enrolments of these learners.
Meaning if you are older, whiter and part time, you may be out of luck when you next try to enrol.
Fully agree with your intrpretation of the situation. My question is why focus on youth when they will leave NZ, costing the taxpayer through large unpaid loans while NZ workers who want to improve their skills can’t get a place in the Universities? The Treasury advice to the Minister is based on the idea that educating youth at degree level will pay NZ back, and on paper that may stack up, but the reality is quite different.
I realised earlylish last year that if I wanted to go back to school for a degree, I needed to do it as soon as possible – I’ve been out of school for ten years, I can’t study full-time due to disability, I’ve dropped out of uni twice already and I’ve never come even close to earning the repayment threshold for student loans, let alone have enough money to fund my studies myself. Luckily I started early when enrolments opened and now I’m prepared for the first year of a diploma through Massey’s extramural program – it will take me two to two and a half years to complete on limited full-time status (if I couldn’t get that I’d be out of luck since part time students can no longer get course related costs) and then I want to turn it into a Bachelors in Maori Studies and Social Policy. Everyone, when they hear it, says “So you’re going to be really employable, then” with no apparent sarcasm – but of course it’s the public and/or non-profit sector I’m looking at, so there’s not a scholarship to be found.
One thing I can say about going into it at 27 rather than 17 is that I have figured out what I want to do. My first go at uni, right out of high school, I picked English and Classics papers because that was what I enjoyed at school. I didn’t even know what social policy was, let alone that in a decade’s time I’d spend nine months working for the Red Cross during a disaster and realise that improving people’s lives was the thing I wanted to spend every day doing. I thought I’d probably be a teacher – something that would be impossible now due to my (now managed) social phobia and the high-stress-long-hours conditions.