The cost of education

14 comments on “The cost of education ”

• Comments are now closed

1. Siobhan 1

   28 January 2017 at 1:35 pm

   Another aspect of this is the lower wage non home owners who are heading into their late forties and fifties just as the kids are heading to university.
   They find themselves using any ‘spare’ cash to help support their kids through university, rather than being able to use those years to save for retirement.
   I notice this issue comes up every now and then in interviews with ‘the struggling classes’, such as the interview with those effected by the 50 cent an hour wage increase this last week.

   Labour are offering a ‘free’ 3 years of study, which is great, and goes some way to mitigate their role in the whole debacle, but my understanding is that covers the down-the-road, student loan aspect, not the actual reality of students from poorer families struggling to cover the here and now living/studying costs of students.
2. Philj 2

   28 January 2017 at 1:37 pm

   Education, like most government ‘services’ has become an income generator, or business opportunity. Charter schools, educating overseas students, migration, roading, broadcasting (remember the Government sell off of SKY), prisons etc…
   • saveNZ 2.1

     28 January 2017 at 2:11 pm

     +1 Philj – ditch the neoliberalism ideology!

     Education should be about the education only! Not trying to turn a profit or subsidise the government.

     Increasingly, wealth is societal wealth, having an educated population – not lowering educational standards so that they can have more profit from more students.

     We need to bring back trade skills like building and plumbing for those that are not academically minded and not make everyone try to be a lawyer or business graduate.

     We need to have a more creative economy – and people who are doing what they want to do, not what they think they can make the most money from! The future is about that, because technology is going to take a lot of jobs in the future and those it can’t replicate are actually creative ones! The opposite of government policy.

     Nowadays the governments make everyone take out a loan for some course that used to be a paid position with on the job training! If you are on WINZ that is the new scam, force them off by making them do a course that they don’t want to do and take out the student loan. That is why we have such ‘low’ unemployment, – unemployed are now students.
   • The Fairy Godmother 2.2

     28 January 2017 at 4:10 pm

     +100. I think the tertiary sector is shocking for this now. When I was young before student loans some
     courses such as teaching ones were capped. They took the amount of trainees they needed, picking the best trainees and paid them well with student allowances. When my mother trained in the 50s you were expected to work out a bond period. She got hers reduced for country service. I think something like this would be great. Students aren’t saddled with loans for a course that doesn’t necessarily lead to a job and government and student money is not going to the education industry to train people for non-existent jobs.
   • Drowsy M. Kram 2.3

     28 January 2017 at 5:46 pm

     Agree with your accurate assessment Philj (and saveNZ/TFG). The tertiary education sector has morphed rapidly from a public service into a competitive industry; universities compete for students and are financially penalised for low pass/completion rates. Any ‘commitment to quality’ is now more lip service that reality; the real commitment is to growing, or at least maintaining income in the face of falling domestic student enrolments.
3. Draco T Bastard 3

   28 January 2017 at 4:41 pm

   Costs up, debt up, participation down – brilliant.

   Working exactly as planned then.
4. Whispering Kate 4

   28 January 2017 at 5:04 pm

   The cost of educating children is just part of the entire education debacle.

   A starter teacher for primary age children is on $47,000 – a lot of young teachers are not returning to school this year and are embarking on new careers. The morale has gone out of their teaching career. They have no autonomy over their class of kids, cannot even spare 10 minutes in a day to teach them basic manners like please and thank you. Some kids are running ragged in the classrooms and cannot handle any sort of rebuke from the teacher, yelling and out of the control and not being able to handle discipline. There is no fun left in the classroom, no time for doing anything that is strictly not on the curriculum. One young woman 28 is not returning and has told one of my family that she knows of many others not returning as its not teaching, its now indoctrination of the syllabus and an obsession with scores for the department. She is at school at 7.30 in the morning and doesn’t leave until well after school has closed. I have no stats for what is happening but this woman was not bullshitting and my family member does not doubt her word as she knows her well.

   Doesn’t bode well for the future with a population of people not used to knowing what is right and wrong and not being to handle basic courtesy situations of every day life.
   • Lara 4.1

     28 January 2017 at 7:09 pm

     I used to teach high school science.

     I will never teach again now, my practice certificate has expired and I have no desire to redo my 1 year post grad diploma.

     The main reason for stopping teaching was the disrespect shown by students. Who learned it from their parents. Parents with the attitude that teachers are teaching because they can’t do. That teaching is an easy option, with light hours and long holidays. That teachers don’t teach anything of use or value, and they’re incompetent.

     That and the crappy pay. I’m earning multiple times what I’d be earning as a teacher now. There’s no way I’ll take a massive pay cut for much longer hours and horrible working conditions.

     Still, I do miss the energy of teenagers and I did love my subject.
5. Lloyd 5

   28 January 2017 at 7:32 pm

   If we don’t educate our children who is going to take care of us in our old age? Only by having young, energetic, motivated young people with the ability to cope with a globally warming world will NZ have a chance of being able to keep the oldies in the lifestyle to which we have been accustomed. Graduates should have their debt repayments made by their employees. Government service should result in rapid repayment.
   Residence in NZ should also contribite to decreasing student debt, this would reduce brain drain.
   • Whispering Kate 5.1

     28 January 2017 at 8:54 pm

     With the education they are getting at present Lloyd, the kids of today won’t give a damn about anybody let alone oldies. It will be a lawless couldn’t give a toss sort of a society. I see it every day, kids running amok in supermarkets and knocking people over etc. Of course I know that we as kids were not perfect but we did know our P’s and Q’s and basic common courtesy. I gave my parents a terrible time for a while there but I never ever treated my teachers with cheek and out of control behaviour. I like the idea that kids have to grow up and learn life’s lessons but not at the expense of treating their educators with no respect. The Government doesn’t have a clue what it is like at the coal face. Parents today also will be in for a hell of a ride when their kids are adolescents – they have my sympathy believe me.
6. Incognito 6

   28 January 2017 at 9:51 pm

   I think this is quite telling:

   MoE sector enablement and support head Katrina Casey said home education had not been inflation-adjusted or changed since it was introduced in 1990 because it was not intended to cover all the costs of home education.

   http://www.stuff.co.nz/timaru-herald/news/88741254/home-schooling-has-doubled-in-cost-some-south-canterbury-home-educators-say
   http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/88591034/lack-of-funding-makes-home-schooling-unrealistic-for-some-families-home-educators-say
7. greg 7

   29 January 2017 at 9:06 am

   national aren’t going to do anything this is there ninth year the great promise of the brighter future has not been delivered its turned to a blighted future .

   housing bubble
   homelessness up
   household debt sky rocketing
   now education cost out of control/worthless qualifications and record student debt
   farmers trashing the water ways
   plus all those kiwis who were sucked in with low interest rates are going to loose everything

   thanks national thanks john key
8. Kelly-Ned 8

   29 January 2017 at 6:24 pm

   They have done something about the spiralling costs of education – they’ve frozen bulk grants for all public schools!! That saves them heaps.
9. Observer Tokoroa 9

   29 January 2017 at 10:51 pm

   The Way Ahead

   . Trump, Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, Little, Peters, Greens -do have quite a lot in common. They are concerned that wealth is going massively to too few.

   . They are concerned that millions of manufacturing jobs are being unnecessarily undertaken by low cost Asia at the request of domestic Corporations.

   . They are against untrammeled immigration which unevenly threatens earning power of citizens.

   . En Masse, people cling to the Right because the Right has access to the very wealthy Corporations and very wealthy Individuals. The Left languishes miserably because it has access to less and less.

   . In time the Right will have enslaved the Common Man so thoroughly that they will lose not only their wealthy glamour but their possessions and their heads.

   For the Planet does not belong to the wealthy.

• Comments are now closed

• Log in
• Donate
• Contribute post

• Articles RSS