Repaying cost of university trainingdecried

Press, 28 July 1986, Page 3

Repaying cost of university trainingdecried

PA Wellington The Senior Government Whip, Dr Michael Cullen, has attacked Treasury proposals to make university students repay the cost of their training.

The Minister of Education, Mr Marshall, said on Monday that it was becoming more and more difficult to defend present university funding policies when that spending was seen as something of a “class privilege.”

But Dr Cullen told the University of Canterbury Labour Club that making students pay for studies through loans instead of bursaries would do nothing to raise the numbers from poorer backgrounds. He said that changing policies on university funding would be a “leap in the dark” unless research was done to find out why so few school pupils went on to tertiary education. Mr Marshall had said research showed that more than half of enrolled students came from families classified as professional, managerial or business. Consideration was being given to the

“user ■ pays” principle where it was feasible and justifiable. In April Mr Marshall revealed , that the Treasury had already come up with some costrecovery proposals for tertiary students, including making them repay the cost of their education later in their careers. Dr Cullen did not refer to Mr Marshall’s comments, instead welcoming what he said was the Minister’s call for public debate on the Treasury proposals. However, he said changing to loans instead of bursaries would not increase the number of people from less affluent backgrounds going on to higher education. "Research already clearly shows _ that students from poorer backgrounds would be far less willing to take up loans. Those that, do may spend up to 20 years paying back those loans.”'

Dr Cullen, a former senior lecturer in history, said people with professional qualifications would demand to earn even more than they did now in order to be able to

repay their loans. "Education will come to be seen as a private good with disastrous consequences in terms of increasing inequality and selfishness.

“Even many of the socalled affluent will find themselves heavily burdened, as they do in the United States, by the imperative to provide for their children’s future tertiary education.”

What was needed was more analysis of the reasons why far too few people were advancing to higher education.

Dr Cullen criticised the Treasury analysis as being less appropriate the more it moved into the social area.

Policy which rested on the assumption that education was a private good was doomed to failure, as society needed professional skills. “The fact that the social background of university students is biased towards the more affluent does not alter, this analysis. "It certainly gives ground for concern that that is so, but changing from bursaries to loans is likely to make the position worse, not better.”