Setting it straight on user-pays in tertiary education – one letter at a time
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Labour’s promise of a return to (limited) free tertiary education appears to be unsettling some, for whom the last thirty years has been dominated by the implementation and bedding-in of user-pays (often gradually, so as not to spook the punters) ; reduced-tax; and minimalist-government ideology;
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I replied to Ms Usher’s public expression of “guilt twinges”…
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from: Frank Macskasy <fmacskasy@gmail.com>
to: The Wellingtonian <editor@thewellingtonian.co.nz>
date: Sat, Feb 13, 2016
subject: Letter to the editor.
The editor
The Wellingtonian.
Sue Usher defends user-pays in Universities, asserting, “anyone who takes out a loan on anything surely knows that there’s no such thing as a free lunch; you are not given money, you are lent it”. (letters, 11 Feb)
Prior to 1992, there were no student loans/debt. Tertiary education was paid from taxes, with the expectation that graduates would, in turn, pay for following generations.
That was the social contract.
That contract dissolved when successive governments introduced user-pays, with seven tax cuts in 1986, 1988, 1996, 1998, 2008, 2009, and 2010. The burden of higher education shifted from society, onto individuals. By 2014, student debt reached $14.8 billion.
Ms Usher admits this unfairness, “I acknowledge that repaying a loan and trying to buy a first home is a mighty challenge and feel slightly guilty that my generation did not have any such system”.
John Key and Tertiary Education minister, Steven Joyce, should also feel a twinge of guilt. Both obtained their University degrees free, paying almost nothing.
Those who parrot the cliche that education is a “private good” should consider if our doctors, scientists, engineers, teachers, et-al, all decided to pack up and move overseas.
Or if none of us could read and write.
Education benefits us all, which user-pays fails to recognise.
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-Frank Macskasy
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[address and phone number supplied]
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Additional
Salient: A short history of tertiary education funding in New Zealand
Ministry of Education: Student Loan Scheme Annual Report 2014
IRD: Student Loan Scheme Amendment Act 2014 – Arrest at border
Fairfax media: Joyce defends student loan crackdown
Fairfax media: Student loan arrest could prompt others to address debt
NZ Herald: ‘I don’t think I’m a criminal’
Teara.govt.nz: National Party – The ‘mother of all budgets’
Sunday Star Times: Politics – John Key – A snapshot
Wikipedia: Steven Joyce
National Party: Steven Joyce
Related blogposts
Letter to the Editor: Steven Joyce – Hypocrite of the Year
The Mendacities of Mr Key # 16: No one deserves a free tertiary education (except my mates and me)
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= fs =
All those useless ministers and other politicians we have, who obtained tertiary education when there were no or only very low fees charged to study, they must surely feel useless, as their education must according to the “logic” of John Key and Steven (joyless) Joyce also be “useless”, as they cannot have valued anything that came to them as virtually free education.
And for this whole new discussion now, it is absurd how people, including media persons and commentary writers defend student loans and interest charged on them (if they are out of the country for long). It just shows how conditioning and brainwashing works, you endlessly repeat something, you set rules and firmly impose them, no matter whether they are fair or may make sense, and then you attack the ones who challenge the “new realities”.
Dissent was fought from the beginning when student loans were introduced, same as the Employment Contracts Act was initially fought against. But with the neoliberal governments we had, starting with a Labour one in the mid 1980s, that turned out to be full of turncoats and traitors among the ranks, we were forced all this onto us. The younger generation knows nothing else than having to face years of financial bondage, with student loan debt and other obligations around their necks.
So naturally some will turn around and argue, why should others after me get it for free or much cheaper?
It is the result of divide and rule, which has turned so many of us against each other, and continues to enable this government to rule and push further with their agendas. I wish people would wake up and see the actual insanity of putting students into tens of thousands of dollars of debt to pay off at some distant future point.
And for those that argue that tertiary education would not be valued if there are no or only low fees, it used to be done like this: You learn and study hard at school and prove you have skill, talent and capabilities to do more, and dependent on your good results, that helped qualify to get you into university. This is the way it is done in places like Germany. You get help when you make the effort and deserve to get a leg up, because it will also serve the whole of society to have more doctors, teachers, engineers, architects and what else may come out of finished university study.
They will earn more than many others and with some higher, I say fairer taxes, they will express their thanks for the good qualification that others help finance by paying higher taxes.
It is so simple and makes so much more sense, but we seem to have ignorant “leaders” who rather wish to see future generations locked into decades of financial bondage and slavery. I wonder why?
Indeed – and if the morons at Treasury had got a little more education we might not be losing $20 billion a year in pursuit of their crypto-fascist fantasies.
So Key, Joyce, etc got a free university education?
Damnable hypocrites, how do they sleep at nights!!
Every citizen has a moral duty NOT to repay any student loans! Not until every politician who benefitted from free education pays for theirs!
CONTINUED… Which sounds very ethical until we see the real motives… that of an interlocking global government whereby the status of a former sovereign nation is reduced to a ‘regional identity ‘ that no longer has true sovereign legislative powers independent from other nations.
The culmination of this process are ‘deals’ such as the TTPA and TTIP,… and from there… the introduction of a cashless common currency . This being enabled by yet another orchestrated ‘world economic crash’.
So this is why New Zealanders have been subjected to this, as we were in fact the guinea pig nation originally.
It is for this reason that Labours introduction of free tertiary education is raising so many hackles among the neo liberals…it not only smacks of the Social Democratic method , … it effectively undermines part of the goals these wretches have been steadily working towards at least in this country… for the last 32 years.
And if enough groundswell of public opinion were to build in favour of free tertiary education , they know this movement could also very quickly spread to those other areas they had meticulously dismantled.
Guys
How about we start coordinating some marches / rallies for free education. Get out views on free education out in the media to try and counter the garbage that is being spun by the government.
Surely students alone would deliver massive numbers to such rallies, and when you include those of us who believe free education benefits everyone, a strong message wolf be delivered!
Keen?
Tertiary education ‘back then’ was NOT ‘free’ inasmuch as text books were priced outrageously, travel and accommodation still had to be met regardless of bursaries and scholarships.
There is little point to proposing ‘free education’ at any level – from kindy through to the University of the Third Age – unless it is also required of our ‘representatives’ that they persistently improve the economy.
Why?
So students can gain real employment and the security of a savings cushion against hard times over the term breaks, and have choices of career-building experience here as well as overseas after graduation.
So far our economic charlatans have failed dismally to provide one of the fundamentals of governing. And our wondrous ‘private enterprise’ is little more than same old same old. Not much use for innovative thinking and education, except for a few glow worm flickers.
Marching might be exhilarating but it’s the relentless drip on the stone that creates the tension and cracks. Or haunting with mozzies. With the same relentless on-message marketing that has brought us to this sorry state – let’s likewise deal to our predator crew. Measured by how quickly the narrative changes – in our favour.
I never claimed tertiary education was 100% free, Andrea. I’ve nearly always referred to University tuition as “near free”.
As well as scholarships, there was also a student allowance, and part time work to top up living costs.
Text books were available second-hand – I recall a thriving cottage-industry in graduates selling their books to new students.
The result was that students pre-1992 did not graduate with massive debt hanging over their necks. Key, Joyce, and Ruth Richardson are prime examples.