Plan discriminates, says lecturer

Press, 29 June 1988, Page 11

Plan discriminates, says lecturer

By

JENNY LONG

A tax on university graduates could discriminate against women and any graduates who enter less well paid jobs, says a senior university lecturer, Dr Jonathan Boston. The Associate Minister of Education, Mr Goff, yesterday publicly supported the tax as one way of increasing university revenue. Dr Boston, a senior lecturer in public policy at Victoria University of Wellington, said that while

the tax had the advantage of not making students pay increased fees before they began studying, it still discriminated against certain groups. Under a new fee structure, and the graduate tax, students would repay 20 per cent of their course costs. For courses such as medicine where the cost was high, students might repay $3OOO for each year of their study. The graduate tax of 2 per cent of income would

not start until the person was earning above the average wage, but interest would have to be paid on the “loan” for the years before payment began, Dr Boston said. Unless a no-interest scheme was introduced, the tax would certainly discriminate against the person who studied medicine and then took time off to raise a family or worked part-time, Dr Boston said.

People entering fields such as social service

where payments would not be greatly above the average wage would also be burdened under the scheme, Dr Boston said.

The scheme was obviously attractive to a Government faced with tight expenditure controls but it would not generate much revenue in the short term, he said.

Any scheme which called for “user contributions” favoured the rich rather than the poor. “My preference is that

the State should be pretty well the sole provider, students paying nominal fees as at present.” However, if open entry to university was retained in the face of the present demand for places, the graduate tax was the best scheme on offer. The Government was unwilling to impose a higher tax on the public and the graduate tax scheme would be far better for students than any private loans scheme, Dr Boston said.