Off Campus magazine: July 2010
Feature
School of Hard Knocks
By Matt Russell
Is our society willing to accept the consequences of capping enrolments in our universities?
Oscar Wilde famously described a cynic as a person “who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”. Since then, the word cynic has often been replaced – with varying degrees of legitimacy – with the words ‘economist’, ‘banker’ and ‘politician’. After two years of aggressive cost cutting in our tertiary education system, on the back of almost two decades of underfunding, it’s hard not to sympathise with educationalists and sector leaders who would extend the invective to include ‘Tertiary Education Minister’.
The idea of tertiary education as a public good has been, if not quite dead, then chronically iffy for some time now. Today, it’s more likely to hear politicians, policy makers and managers within the Ministry of Education emphasising the private benefits of a tertiary education – tertiary study is a pathway to elite employment, higher wages and social prestige. And if the benefits of university study are mostly private, it follows that the costs should be as well. Steadily rising fees and dwindling public funding for institutions seem like business as usual for a relentlessly embattled tertiary sector. Fees go up, students blame institutions, institutions blame the government, and the government ignores everybody – a series of exchanges so predictable now that they might as well be learnt by rote.
Despite these rising costs however, one thing has always remained relatively consistent about our tertiary system: the expectation that everybody can have the opportunity to tread the path through university study – providing they can prove at least a modicum of academic ability. Our student loans and allowance system (at least in theory) is supposed to take some of the sharp edges off the user-pays system and maintain open doors to higher education. And this emphasis on equal access can be traced back to the very creation of our modern education system under the first Labour Government’s Director of Education, Clarence Beeby:
“The government’s objective, broadly expressed, is that every person, whatever their level of academic ability, whether they be rich or poor, whether they live in town or country, has a right as a citizen to a free education of the kind for which they are best fitted and to the fullest extent of their powers.”
As Beeby went on to say, this wasn’t a “mere pious platitude”, but required a transformation of our educational institutions so they were no longer the preserve of the “gifted few”, but rather “catered to the whole population [and are] as rich and varied as the people who enter them.”
Almost 60 years later, this ideal of egalitarianism is being undermined by a move to cap student numbers across all courses in all universities. Last year Auckland University turned away 1100 students, and this year the number was almost 2000. Next year, both Victoria University and Massey University will join Auckland in introducing ranking systems for entrants under 20, meaning half of all enrolment places at New Zealand universities will be subject to competitive entry criteria. It is the single biggest change to our tertiary system since the introduction of student fees in 1990, and one that has happened so quickly that it has almost totally bypassed the public radar. Some fear it signals an end to open access education in New Zealand, and a move towards the kind of elitism New Zealanders have always liked to believe happened somewhere else.
Massey Vice Chancellor Steve Maharey has no doubt we are witnessing a sea change in the university sector. “I think it’s fair to say it’s the end of open access as we have known it in New Zealand. It has been the most open entry system anywhere in the developed world, and I think now we are moving to a system more like what you would find in the rest of the world – there are a limited number of places and people compete for them.”
Although our universities have always limited entries to some courses, the implementation of competitive ranking systems across all courses is a totally new development in this country. Points will be based on a Grade Point Average for NCEA level 3, with extra points given for bursary and scholarship. As Maharey explains, “Universities will be saying to students, ‘Yes, you may well have qualified to come, but the government is only funding us for so many places. We are legally obliged to maintain a certain standard of quality, and therefore we have to apply some criteria on who is accepted from that group.” In other words, for the first time, University Entrance will no longer guarantee school-leavers entrance into universities.
The result is that – facing a funding freeze and potential financial penalties for exceeding the 103% enrolment threshold set by the Ministry of Education – universities have suddenly been forced to do something they’ve never had to do before: figure out how to keep students out. Almost all universities are currently scrambling to stay within the prescribed enrolment limit: Massey closed second semester enrolments for domestic students earlier than planned, as well as substantially cut back summer school offerings in semester three. “These are not changes we want to be making,” says Maharey. “They really are in response to the [Tertiary Education] Commission, who have made it clear that there will be implications if we don’t comply.”
Despite the magnitude of these changes, their causes are little understood by the majority of New Zealanders. The roots of the issue go back – as these things tend to do – to the economic reforms of the 80s and 90s and the tertiary funding system established therein. The ‘bums on seats’ funding model established by the 1991 National Government encouraged universities to view students as jam-jars for funding, chasing as many enrolments as possible and introduce cheaper courses of dubious quality (such as those darned twilight golf courses) to prop up the less lucrative ones. As student numbers grew (the proportion of 18 to 24 year-olds enrolled in public tertiary institutions rose from 20.5% to 30.2% between 1990 and 2001), government investment steadily declined, with the burden for the funding deficit placed squarely on the back of students through perpetually rising fees.
“The old ‘bums on seats’ model was terrible for students and institutions,” says Dr Tom Ryan, National President of the Tertiary Education Union. “You got this proliferation and duplication of courses just for profit – like 23 different teacher education courses, all competing for students. This made it really hard for students, who’d end up making choices based on advertising and marketing. Institutions wasted millions on this marketing, and at the same time you got the loss of courses which were really important for the country but didn’t make a profit.”
Institutions learned to see themselves as “providers” operating in a bold new tertiary education marketplace. During the 1990s fees rose at an average of 13% a year, and although more than half of student fees are still subsidised through the public purse, according to the OECD New Zealanders now pay amongst the highest tertiary fees in the Western world. Between 1991 and 2002, government funding for universities dropped from 73% of total operating revenue to 42%, and a Deloitte study in 2006 showed the figure down to just 37%, compared to 46% for Australian universities. After substantial cuts in the last two budgets under National, this figure is now likely to be closer to 35%.
“Something’s got to give”, says Maharey. “I’ve seen the government saying that in the OECD rankings, we do quite well in terms of tertiary investment. Well, I’m afraid I can’t find that. What I think the government might be doing is loading in the investment that goes into student loans and allowances, and if you do load that in, we don’t look so bad. But when you take that out and look at how much is actually being invested in institutions, then we don’t look so good at all.”
In other countries such as Britain, spending on student support is usually distinguished from funding for institutions – whereas our government combines them inside the overall tertiary spend. This has led to familiar accusations, from groups like the New Zealand Vice Chancellor’s Committee, that an excessively magnanimous student support system is sapping the lifeblood from universities. As Stuart McCutcheon, Vice Chancellor of Auckland University grouched during the 2008 election campaign, “New Zealand already spends too much on student support, and any more money, at the expense of institutions, will do nothing to enhance the performance of the tertiary education sector.”
Maharey, as Tertiary Education Minister under Labour, would prefer to take a more panoramic view. He says it was the “catastrophic drop” in public funding during the 1990s that made interest-free student allowances the dominant political issue leading up to the 2005 election.
“This became a national issue – to shift that debt burden off students,” he says. “And it was only in about 2006 that full attention was starting to shift back to universities. So really you’d say that during the 1990s the erosion was huge, and during the early 2000s students got a support system that, comparatively around the world was quite generous, but the universities had only just got back to a level pegging – and now we’re seeing more cuts.”
While it might be news to other Vice Chancellors that universities achieved a “level pegging” under Labour, National has been unequivocal that the cupboard is now well and truly bare. As Bill English bluntly put it to sector heads at the recent Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics conference in Wellington, “Don’t run out of money, because I’m not going to give you any … You fix it, or we will find someone else who will make the decision that needs to be made.” Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce has made it clear that there will be no new cash injections; rather, National’s Tertiary Education Strategy seeks to “free up money within the existing budget”, as well as to give institutions “additional flexibility” to raise revenue. Given the government’s introduction of a $50 a year ‘graduate fee’, as well as a recently begun review of the fee maxima policy, it seems sensible to read these statements as unimaginative euphemisms for more and bigger fee increases. Put it all together, and students will find it both tougher and more expensive to get into university.
Despite our history of open access, New Zealand does not score particularly highly across the OECD in terms of the proportion of our population with a degree qualification. New Zealand is ranked eighteenth out of 30 countries. Ahead of us are most Northern European countries, Japan, Korea, Canada, the UK, Ireland and Australia. Australia has 31% of its population with a degree qualification, compared to New Zealand’s 27%. Given that the notion of the ‘knowledge economy’ still appears prominently in the government’s strategies for economic development, surely this indicates we should be encouraging more people into universities, rather than fewer?
“I think it’s obvious that it does,” says Dr Ryan. “Especially given that Australia is ramping up its investment in education A$1 billion a year over the next five years. [Australia’s] objective is to increase to 40% the number of people with degrees. If we want to keep up with Australia, as the Prime Minister claims, we should be investing proportionately – which would mean a couple of $100 million extra in tertiary education. With that level of increased funding, open entry could effectively be restored.”
The fact that New Zealand universities struggle to compete with those across the Tasman is not a new revelation, one that Australian universities have sought to aggressively exploit. Most Australian universities offer generous incentives and scholarships to lure away our best students, and the dux of each school will receive letters from both ANU and Melbourne University as a matter of course. But when so many other countries – Australia, Britain, the US – have responded to the global recession by piling billions of dollars into tertiary education, why has our government taken the direct opposite path?
“Most countries took a very counter-cyclical investment strategy, and therefore they spent a lot of money on areas like education,” says Maharey. “Our government has been focussed on keeping down debt levels. And there’s some merit to that – other countries are carrying extraordinary levels of debt, and of course we’re seeing the effects from that on the Euro now. Universities would say [that] while they can accept there are different pathways through the economic crisis, this seems to be a very good time to invest in education. You’ve got thousands of people who need to lift their skills, need to get re-qualified, need to get qualified [so] we can come out of the recession stronger and with more capacity.”
Dr Ryan offers a blunter assessment: “This government’s agenda – regardless of recession – would be cost cutting in the public sector. The Rudd and Obama administrations are socially democratic in a political sense, and have responded to the recession with various stimulus measures. Our government is much more blatantly neo-liberal and its response has been more reactive – create cutbacks wherever you can.”
For Ryan, there’s a distinctly Alice in Wonderland character to the constant comparisons made between New Zealand and Australia. ‘We’re the seventh lowest taxed country in the OECD. We’ve just had a budget that has given massive tax cuts to the top 5% of income earners. Now [Australia] has just 10% GST, they have a top tax rate of 43 cents to the dollar. We’re told we have to do the exact opposite things that Australia is doing, at the same time we’re striving to become more like Australia!’
Critics have also pointed to other, potentially more harmful consequences of the current direction of tertiary policy. A number of peak sector groups have argued that institutions will be deterred from enrolling groups who tend to perform less well academically – particularly Maori and Pasifika students – both because their NCEA results will not be high enough, and because their relatively low course completion rates may endanger institutions’ access to government subsidies.
John Minto, chairman of the Quality Public Education lobby group and a former secondary school teacher, has firsthand experience of the barriers to higher education encountered by youth from low-income families. He says the move to capped enrolments is “just another step away from open access”.
“There have been many, many steps away from it, and this is just the latest. And it’s going to impact on Maori and Pasifika kids in particular. They’re the ones who often struggle early on in school, but many of them will start to come into their own in senior school years – around seventh form. A disproportionate number of those who just scrape into university now tend to be Maori and Pasifika students. What you’ll find now is there are fewer and fewer of them getting through.”
When it comes to educational attainment, the sons and daughters of privilege have always outdone the sons and daughters of deprivation. According to the Ministry of Education, in 2008 only 8% of school leavers in decile 1 and 2 schools had University Entrance, compared with 65% in the top two deciles. While the proportion of Maori leaving school with qualifications has improved over the past two decades, the gap has increased when compared to other ethnicities. In 2003, just 11.7% attained NCEA level 3 – 33% below the national average.
When Minto began teaching at Otara’s Tangaroa College in 2000, he says only two or three students made it in to university every year. After tremendous effort, that number climbed to nearly 30:
“We worked really hard to build university into kids’ perceptions – to demystify it and encourage kids to see it as a real opportunity. Because if you’re in Otara, university is so far away – it’s just a mystical place at some far distance. Under the capping system, these kids who just scrape through will be cut off from the beginning. Maybe they’ll be able to do a simple degree, maybe they’ll be able to go to polytechs. But the simple reality is we’re taking from the kids who deserve the best chance they possibly can.”
Minto says the capping system will just be another barrier atop many others for school-leavers from lower socio-economic backgrounds. “Take the loan scheme for example”, he says. “It’s incredibly scary for working class families – particularly Maori and Pasifika families – to borrow thousands and thousands of dollars to go to university. They see what happens all around them. Loan sharks operating in the community, and they see people lose their cars, lose their houses, lose their dignity. Often, parents will discourage their kids from taking out a student loan and instead encourage them to do a course that is free. There are some great free community courses, but they’re basic, and they’re not going to take you anywhere. The barriers are just enormous.”
Universities are taking various measures to ‘sustain’ Maori enrolments. Auckland University, for example, last year admitted 170 Maori students under a “targeted admission” programme. Maharey agrees that the capping system certainly has the potential to further exclude those groups already most excluded from tertiary study. He says the Ministry of Education is telling institutions that it is aware of the issue, and has indicated it will work together with universities to ensure it does not happen. He says the onus will effectively fall on institutions – particularly Massey with the highest proportion of Maori students – to make a case to the Tertiary Education Commission that they must structure the capping system in such a way that leaves the door open for Maori enrolments.
“It falls on our investment plan to make it clear that we have a particular profile at the university, and while obviously we have to adjust that profile to fit more with what is wanted from the government, we still want to put a priority on Maori students, and we want to keep the door open for both school leavers and also older students returning to study.”
Minto says he’s been around the block enough times to be sceptical about such claims. He recalls the promises made by the Labour government in 1990 to keep fees under $1000.
“I think it’s more likely that National will just leave its government contribution the same, and that contribution will effectively erode over time. Fees will go up, less and less kids will get in, and universities will just become more the preserve of the elite. All National and ACT want to do is take a tiny handful of these kids and ‘save’ them from their poor community. Well bugger it – that’s a bullshit answer. We have to provide for every kid.”
Regardless of how the system will work in practice, it’s clear we have ended up in a place very distant from Beeby’s vision of a universalised education system. For Beeby, as with other post-depression educational reformers, education was more than just a matter of increasing individuals’ social mobility; rather, it was a prerequisite for a civilised and democratic society. Obviously, these are benefits not easily measured in dollars and cents; or at least not before our society has become distinctly less civilised and democratic. Maharey doesn’t think the idea of public tertiary education is dead, rather, ‘There’s a narrowing of the definition of what education is for. And I think probably the next ten years or so will be crucial in seeing where this argument will go, because if it carries on to higher and higher fees, more and more private input into institutions, then that could be a decisive shift.”
