Public Tertiary Education

Written By: - Date published: 12:20 pm, January 18th, 2011 - 13 comments
Categories: education, public services - Tags: , ,

All of us have things we believe are purely public goods that should receive government support. For example, few people outside the Act Party would argue that basic health care or environmental conservation is a private good that individuals should choose to fund, depending on their own self-interest. Then there are things most of us view as private goods; tickets to the opera or rugby, iPods, fluffy covers for your steering wheel. You won’t hear many people making eloquent arguments that these things bring public benefit and therefore should be publicly funded.

And then there are a whole lot of goods and services that, for many people, sit somewhere in the middle. Tertiary education is one of those things. Everyone acknowledges that a tertiary education will, in many cases, give people significant private benefits in terms of income across their lifetime and other markers of well-being.

But, we also know that tertiary education provides many essential public benefits. As the government’s Tertiary Education Strategy 2010-2015 notes, higher education levels have been linked to better general well-being, better health, and greater social mobility. All of these mean less drain on the health system and thus less taxpayers’ money spent on health care. What’s more, people within tertiary qualifications are more involved in the community and are more likely to vote and stand for public office. Tertiary education promotes civic engagement, debate, democracy, and cultural expression.

And of course, many of the private benefits of tertiary education don’t really stack up as fairly as they should. Someone who follows their dream to become a hairdresser and invests tens of thousands of dollars of student loans probably will not to get commensurate economic returns over their lifetime, despite his or her efforts.

Likewise, a medical student that spends invests $100,000 learning to be a doctor, then then takes their skills to run a heavily self-subsidised and underfunded clinic in Otara, is unlikely to see much private economic benefit in return for his or her private commitment of time and money.

It has been a while since the tertiary education community clearly articulated why public tertiary education is important, and what we need to do, as a community, to protect and hopefully even enhance it.

Public tertiary education exposes us to new ideas, new people and new opportunities. Public education gives substance to the Kiwi dream of equality and freedom. It helps bring social justice to our communities. It gives our economy real, sustainable economic strength. Through research and learning it expands our horizons and connects our past to our future, and connects New Zealanders with the rest of the world.

Currently our tertiary education system in New Zealand does all these things and more. Those of us who work in tertiary education institutions are committed to our students and to our communities. On-the-whole this commitment means that our tertiary education system does a great job, but it faces significant pressures to maintain high standards. Private providers do try to undercut our big providers on quality and price. More importantly public providers are constantly tempted to act as though they are private companies – competing with each other for students and funding, spending millions advertising for students when they don’t have space to take them, rationalising and cutting courses that don’t give a good economic return, and increasing the workload of staff by refusing to hire staff as student populations grow.

I agree with the government that public tertiary education should provide opportunities for all New Zealanders. What we need now is for the government to ensure its actions make this vision real.

In a number of areas the actions of government have failed to support the vision of providing opportunities for all. Public tertiary education should encourage people into study. Yet the foundation courses funding that helped many people into tertiary education are being closed down because they fail to achieve a good enough economic return.

We also should ensure we have a system which supports all communities in every region of New Zealand. And yet the current government, in recent years, has cut more than $50 million out of our polytechnics – the same regional institutions that, if given the change, could be helping keep regions healthy and people in jobs through the recession .

Public tertiary education should enable community involvement in the governance of institutions. And yet, the government has removed all the staff and student representatives from polytechnic councils and made sure that ministerial appointees will always have a majority on those councils. Our public education system is something we all own and should govern together.

Public education should support all research, not just that in which businesses see short-term benefit. And yet the government’s new tertiary education strategy shifts the funding focus only towards that research which businesses see as valuable. The research that public tertiary institutions do opens new doors and challenges us to see the world from new perspectives. While research to support business and the economy is important it cannot be the only type of research we support publicly. In times of economic and political uncertainty, we need New Zealanders to be well armed to debate the direction they want for the nation and to think creatively to solve problems. Research into these problems is non-commercial and may event affect some individual businesses and business activities negatively.

If we are going to give ordinary New Zealanders a fair chance to learn skills and attain the knowledge they need, we need to make sure that tertiary education in all our regions is accessible, affordable, and supportive. That means lower fees, more investment in our public tertiary education institutions, transparent, equitable admission and selection criteria and processes, and supportive grants that help families to get by while individuals take the chance to study.

We need a unified public tertiary education system that cooperates to help ordinary people get the education they need, rather than institutions competing to make a profit off students and their families. Public tertiary education should be about learning, not running a business.

We believe there is a social good to public education. Education should not respond to market signals alone but also to the needs of communities, their many cultures and visions of the good life, and of course our environment. Good public tertiary education helps individuals reach their dreams and goals, but more importantly it helps New Zealand become a better place economically, socially, and culturally.

Sandra Grey

National President Te Tumu Whakarae

Tertiary Education Union

13 comments on “Public Tertiary Education ”

  • Comments are now closed

  1. higherstandard 1
    18 January 2011 at 1:18 pm

    Hi Sandra

    Do you know how much of the MOE budget is spent on tertiary education in comparison to secondary, primary and ECE ?

  2. Stephen Day 2
    18 January 2011 at 4:15 pm

    Hi higherstandard,

    The govt spends about $4.1 billion on tertiary education out of a total education spend of around $12 billion. Most of that remaining $8 billion goes to compulsory education and ECE gets pretty much the remainder. Although a bit out of date the MoE’s State of Education in New Zealand report is a helpful summary how the money is spent.
    Worryingly, as Blighty notes, education funding as a whole has no chance of keeping pace with inflation, according to the Treasury forecasts I linked to above.

  3. Afewknowthetruth 3
    18 January 2011 at 4:36 pm

    ‘visions of the good life, and of course our environment’

    Sandra is well meaning but is obviously just clueless as most other people: the so-called ‘good life is obtained by destroying the environment. The ‘good life ‘and a good environment are mutually exclusive concepts.

    Furthermore, with peak oil in the rear vision mirror, most of the employment students foresee obtaining will vanish over the coming few years. Most students are wasting their time and money studing for qualifications that will shortly have no value or relevance..

    Try telling them and you usually hit the walls of ignorance and denial.

    So they’ll find out the hard way. So sad, but that’s the way it is in this scientifically illiterate society. .

    • Adele 3.1
      18 January 2011 at 5:34 pm

      Teenaa koe, afewknowthetruth

      From a Te Ao Taangata Whenua perspective (the worldview of indigeneity) a ‘good’ life can only be had when in accord with the natural world. I totally agree that our present stance on the planet is unsustainable and that we should be preparing the future populace for an era of need and not want.

    • Matthew 3.2
      19 January 2011 at 11:08 am

      This is the reason why we need more tertiary education, focussed not on what businessmen think is useful, but on the liberal arts. These used to be the art of being a free man, not a peasant, but could now be thought of as the art of being more than just a wage slave.

      When consumerism is so ingrained that even people like yourself hear ‘the good life’ and go immediately to having nice stuff, rather than the Nichomachean ethics and eudaimonia, it shows a serious bias in education. You certainly haven’t come across as a consumerist in my lurking, but still you buy into the idea that education is there to get employment, rather than to be educated.

  4. Swampy 4
    18 January 2011 at 10:59 pm

    What a shame that this author cant see past their left wing bias and admit PTEs have a role in tertary education

    • Maynard J 4.1
      19 January 2011 at 12:23 am

      Fancy taking the time to articulate why you hold that point of view, instead of this inane sniping from the sidelines?

      You could, for example, point out that a PTE would have taught you how to spell and use punctuation correctly, if you believe that to be the case (and believe it is the fault of a public provider that you currently can’t).

  5. Stephen Day 5
    19 January 2011 at 8:02 am

    Swampy, TEU definitely believes that PTEs have a role in tertiary education. Most of them are doing great work, just like public institutions and providing a great education for both local and international students. The danger is though when government’s ideological support for PTEs comes at the expense of our public education system – either in the form of government subsidies for their for-profit business, or by failing to crack down on the few cowboys out there that give New Zealand education bad reputation. But PTEs are not a big issue in our tertiary education system – a very small proportion of students study at PTEs. The bigger issue is the propensity of our public providers to act as though they are private providers.

  6. Anthony Robins 6
    19 January 2011 at 11:19 am

    Thanks for that informative post Sandra, and for your comments here Stephen. It’s great to see the TEU (my union) getting out and about on the blogs. I hope you’ll consider posting here at The Standard more often. Education is our future…

  7. Green Tea 7
    20 January 2011 at 1:18 pm

    Does the TEU believe in free education for all New Zealanders? Or how about abolishing the student loan scheme? Or how about alternative economic ideologies that don’t subject Education to market forces?

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