Editorial: Quality education won't come cheaply

OPINION: The University Students Association is to be applauded for its egalitarian instincts. They accord with the New Zealand ethos.

However, the association, long a training ground for Labour Party apparatchiks, would enhance its credibility if it spent less time bleating about the cost of university studies and more focusing on the quality of the education on offer.

It makes a habit of engaging its mouth before its brain. The most recent instance occurred on Tuesday when co-presidents David Do and Pene Delaney issued a statement condemning new Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce, the Government's tyre-kicker-in-chief, for saying that from 2012 a percentage of the state funding provided to tertiary institutions will be linked to their academic performance and for adding that he'd also like to restrict student loans to students who pass their courses.

According to Mr Do, tertiary institutions do not have the resources to provide more support to students and so, presumably, to lift their own performance. According to Ms Delaney, most students already work hard and there is no need to threaten to take away their loans if they do not perform.

Here is a newsflash for the association: the quality of the education available to its members, and students at other tertiary institutions, has gradually been eroded over the past couple of decades by underfunding and a bums-on seats-policy that rewards institutions according to the number of students enrolled rather than their performance.

The Government does not have a magic pool of money into which it can dip to make up the shortfall. It is effectively borrowing $200 million a week to maintain existing levels of public services, debt that will eventually have to be made good by the the association's members and generations yet unborn.

If improvements are to be made to the system, the money has to come from within the existing tertiary education budget. Mr Joyce is doing exactly what the association should be imploring him to do – looking for poor-quality institutions and courses so that money can be redirected from them to institutions and courses that provide value for money.

He is proposing to do the same with students. Good on him. Every student who is not turning up to class, repeatedly failing or using a student allowance or loan to subsidise a lifestyle that has nothing to do with study is wasting money that could otherwise be used to provide a better education for students motivated to make the most of their opportunities.

The association should forget about trying to score political points and focus on advancing its members' real interests. Students should ask themselves whether they would rather buy a clapped-out jalopy with a wound-back odometer for $25,000 or a modern, reliable warranted vehicle for $35,000.

Mr Joyce knows the answer to that question. It is to buy a quality vehicle that will stand the test of time. The same holds true for education. Forget cheap; think quality.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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Kararaina2   #2   02:14 pm Mar 12 2010

In the same way that student loans should be for academic performance - so too, the Minister should be looking beyond loan conditions and simple measures of academic success by restricting public funding to those institutions who can show that not only are students graduating but that upon graduation, student investors are indeed finding work, with increases in earnings (income, less course costs, travel, opportunity cost, interest over time spent waiting for investment in qualification to return).

Instead of bums on seats all that will probably come out of this restricting of loans based on passing a provider's own measure of success is that: there will be increases in grants to providers. Worse, providers will be given even greater control over public investments (monopoly, not quality). That is not ok. Fairness to taxpayers, student investors, sponsors, employers in markets for skills requires that the value of earch individual investment should be kept under review. This problem of needing more information about the quality of qualifications by measuring for return on student investment is much more important that was first thought. More work is needed Minister.

Kararaina   #1   10:09 am Mar 12 2010

Agree totally, on a need for quality tertiary qualifications. Only problem is that your policy solution is premised on a seriously flawed assumption: That students are irrational, (i.e. timewasters, idiots and dodgy people(?)are getting in. There are other reasons why student investors (of time, course cost, travel, opportunity cost, interest, overtime) are not completing, like political interference by providers not made known during enrolment processes, or parchments refused or courses abandoned due to quality problems with courses not made known on enrolment. Nevertheless, the current idea of regulating entry and courses simply isn't going far enough. It simply enables advisors to dumb=down student investors.

Preliminary research shows that student investors are rational - not irrational as is being suggested, and treating tertiary qualifications as a rational investment and expecting to find work, on graduation. to find work on graduation. That holds for students who happen to be Maori as well as other group of student investors, often referred to as non-Maori. Arguably, no amount of measuring by a provider's own protected measure of academic performance alone is going to sufficiently inform student investors, sponsors, employers in the markets for skills. More information on return on student investments is what is required (i.e. a few more questions on enrolment, a few more lines on enrolment data spreadsheets and electronic publications) so that students can make more informed decisions about which classes to invest in. Otherwise, better for families to invest internationally where qualifications are measured both ways - by a provider's own protected measure of student academic performance as well as by return on student investment. In turn, this results in a return for government investment and forces up the quality of qualifications.

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