Student loans urged

Press, 28 March 1979, Page 20

Student loans urged

DR A. E. LEVETT,

a former Labour Party candi-

date and a university sociologist elaborates his view that student bursaries should be abolished.

The university bursary system is New Zealand s super-support for tertiary students; it prevents them from standing on their own feet and from being responsible for their own actions, writes Mr Allan Levett, of Wellington, in reply to an editorial. “Bursaries should stay,” in “The Press of March 16. Mr Levett writes:

"Your arguments m favour of continuing this unproductive, unfair coddling are without good evidence. The facts we have available sav something very different

about the points you raise. “You write that bursaries help prevent ‘the New Zealand class structure from becoming rigid. The facts say that bursaries have no such effect. Over the last 20 vears New Zealand university students have come more and more from privileged backgrounds. ..... “You write that, higher income families would be far more likely to avail themselves of . • loans ■ The facts suggest that neither loans nor bursaries affect who gets to the tertiary institutions. During the 19605, while access was . becomin_ more unequal in New Zealand, blacks and other poor minorities were making great gains in the United States, due to the civil rights movement, rather than the svstem of loans and scholarships. But it does show that loans can work

for the poor too. “You write that tertiary qualifications do not lead to

higher earnings. The facts say that the differences are dramatic, as most fourth formers know, and are becoming even more marked. Graduates earn much more over their lifetimes and also live longer — which means that they get more of national superannuation too. “You wrote that bursary payments are a wise investment by government because they lay ‘the ground for future productivity.’ The facts about New Zealand’s comparative decline surely call this assertion into question. Which future? What

productivity? And, considering the number of trained New Zealanders who go .overseas, we might also ask, whose productivity? “The bursary system does not work, even in the ways you want it to. “And it is not fair either. Compare the lives of two 19-year-olds. The first is a timber worker in a mill who left school four years ago. With no free medical service or recreational guidance, he has found his own accommodation and pays for it himself, earns just below the average wage, will not get much above that all his working life in a dangerous job where he is likely to lose part of his body, and he pays high marginal tax rates, part of which will go towards the $230 million we will spend this year on tertiary education. An even more limited outlook faces a woman in a tobacco factory. “Contrast this with the student, who has still got

counsellors to turn to for free medical, accommodation. personal, recreational and vocational advice; who pays no taxes and pays virtually nothing for the tuition (costing $5OOO to $lO,OOO a year) that will give him (or her) a well-paid job for life. On top of that we hand him, as a gift without obligation, about $26 a week to help with living expenses. “All I am suggesting at this stage is that he can have that $26, or more if he wants it, as a loan, with interest, to be paid back within a negotiable period. It’s a modest stimulus for the student to be more independent, to know where his obligation comes from, and to be more responsible for his own future.

“There is a lot of talk about trimming Government spending, but the only targets so far are the weakest among us. No principles are put forward to provide guidelines for making cuts. “One of the principles might be the promotion of initiative and the discouraging of dependency. We spend a lot of energy trying to enforce this principle among solo mothers and the unemployed. But we disregard it when the beneficiaries are middle class groups which are, in fact, the biggest charge on State spending. “It is from them that we most need more productive enterprise these days, for the good of the country. “Tertiary education used to be about 6 per cent of education spending in the 19505. Now it is more than 22 per cent Surely my suggestion about bursaries is both principled and practical.”