Free fees and changing degrees
The money or the future? The Government is bringing further change to higher education. reports.
Nine years ago, when he gave his maiden speech in Parliament as a fresh-faced 30-year-old Labour MP, Chris Hipkins related how his time in higher education politicised him.
He had been a student at Victoria University in the late 1990s, working towards a BA in politics and criminology and a law degree he never quite finished, when he protested against the Jenny Shipley government’s tertiary education policies.
He remembered being ‘‘forcibly removed from the grounds of Parliament’’ and finding himself ‘‘enjoying Her Majesty’s hospitality at the Wellington Central police station’’.
What had happened in anger was recalled in relative amusement.
He came into Parliament just as Labour was heading into another long spell in Opposition.
The previous nine years, he said proudly, had seen the end of ‘‘massive tuition fee increases’’ and the introduction of interest-free student loans.
But there was also a sense of unfinished business.
Fast-forward to 2017 and Hipkins is the minister of education.
The coalition Government’s first 100 days programme has already included the rapid introduction of no tertiary fees in 2018, as part of a promise to provide three free years by 2024, and a $50 increase in student allowances and student loans weekly living costs limits.
This occurs against a backdrop of lower student numbers in our universities and greater problems in regional institutes of technology and polytechnics, known in the sector as ITPs.
The free fees are expected to benefit around 80,000 students with the majority of them, some 50,000, in ITPs, wa¯nanga and industry training and the remaining 30,000 in universities.
It should create 2000 more students than otherwise, or a 3 per cent increase.
It will not stop the decline in university student numbers but it should slow it down.
As the recently released briefing to the incoming minister from the Tertiary Education Commission revealed, Government-funded learners in New Zealand universities slipped from a high of 160,231 in 2010 to 150,115 in 2016.
Why are fewer learning? In fact, it’s not all bad news.
If there are jobs around, there are fewer students, and the labour market has been quite strong.
But there is also a nervousness about the cost of study, particularly in poorer families, if study comes with a significant debt.
As he surveys the overall tertiary sector and thinks beyond the first 100 days, Hipkins confesses to being more concerned about the ITPs than universities.
Apart from Lincoln University in Canterbury, our universities are big enough to absorb economic shocks, whereas ‘‘we’ve got some ITPs that are very small and struggling to maintain their financial viability,’’ he says.
‘‘We need to look quite carefully at whether we have got things right in that vocational education space. I don’t think we have.’’
The commission described this parlous state when it said that many ITPs, especially outside big cities, ‘‘have no buffer against a downturn in revenue or increase in costs’’.
It went on, ominously: ‘‘Over time, unless something changes, these ITPs will experience an event that tips them over the edge, or will gradually become less capable of delivering high-quality and attractive offerings to students.’’
There will be ‘‘significant change in the subsector’’ over the next three years, the commission said. What might change look like? Hipkins answers that with other questions to be answered.
Do we need centres of excellence rather than every ITP trying to do everything?
If so, would those students travel to other centres like university students do?
Why are so many ITPs trying to get a foothold in Auckland when they are supposed to be in the business of regional provision?
‘‘We’ve got a lot of very small organisations,’’ Hipkins says.
Follow the money
If you were at all romantic about tertiary education and pictured dreaming spires and higher learning, perhaps even students in gowns poring over ancient manuscripts, you might be disappointed to see that the commission briefing that set the tone was mostly concerned with employability. Hipkins agrees. ‘‘There is a certain ‘follow the money’ culture that has been promoted over the past decade that has narrowed some of the wider debate around the overall value of participating in education,’’ he says.
‘‘It’s not just a private good, it’s a public good. We need to rediscover that ethos.’’
A public good is a relatively unfashionable idea after nine years dominated by former tertiary education minister Steven Joyce.
It was Joyce who got many people’s backs up in 2016 when he released information designed to show that students should study science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) subjects as they would earn more money.
It was an idea of tertiary education as a private good.
‘‘The release of this information will help students and their families to make smart decisions about what to study which will set them up for a prosperous future,’’ Joyce said.
‘‘To some extent students will always want to follow their passion but this information will help them to see where their passion may lead them in terms of future income.’’ The passion or the money? Hipkins’ thinking is radically different to that.
‘‘A university education is not just about making yourself more employable,’’ he says.
‘‘If you talk to employers about the skills and dispositions they want a graduate to have, they want critical thinkers, people who can digest large volumes of information and make sense of it, who can be analytical. They are talking about the profile of a graduate across a huge breadth of programmes.
‘‘I think we go down a very dangerous path if we say that a university degree is preparation for a particular job. We know that university graduates tend to be pretty adaptable and flexible.’’
Are we talking about the revenge of the arts?
People have started looking for signs and clues, hints of a new direction.
A day before Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced details of the free fees policy at Aotea College near Wellington, she delivered a speech to the faithful at the Auckland Theatre Awards.
Like Helen Clark before her, Ardern doubles as arts and culture minister and her speech suggested a resumption of Clark-era thinking in the arts.
Ardern said she looked forward to a time when people like her and the theatre professionals she addressed would no longer have to explain why the arts is important, ‘‘when we [would] all just know it’’.
Ideas about community, heritage, identity and culture will be reflected in the arts and people who work in the sector, Ardern implied, can stand up after nine years of crouching defensively.
Similar thinking is starting to be heard in the tertiary education sector.
‘‘We all benefit from people being lifelong learners,’’ says political scientist Sandra Grey, president of the Tertiary Education Union.
‘‘We all benefit from having highly qualified, highly trained people in our community. I think New Zealand has lost sight of that, because of narrowing [ideas about] education.’’
For the past decade, the tertiary sector has been stuck in short-term thinking, as the University of Canterbury’s Paul Millar explains in a cool office during the recent Christchurch heatwave.
Millar’s title is deputy pro-vicechancellor of the College of Arts and head of the School of Humanities and Creative Arts. At Canterbury, the arts were hit twice.
Student numbers were disproportionately affected by the 2011 earthquake plus it was hurt by the preference for Stem subjects.
Stem has been more than a national trend. It has been a global one.
Job cuts in the humanities at Canterbury prefigured more recent proposals to reduce staff numbers at Otago and Waikato.
In each case, proposals prompted soulsearching about the role of the arts in higher education.
Millar has nothing against Stem subjects – two of his three children are studying in those areas and some Stem colleagues are creative and socially aware musicians, activists and artists – but he says the previous government created silos that locked people into Stem versus arts mindsets that many would like to break down.
He looks at internationally emerging disciplines like environmental humanities, where scientific findings are augmented with ‘‘insights into the social and cultural implications of discoveries, as well as the value of being able to effectively communicate such new knowledge’’, and sees a way forward.
‘‘Around the country, for arts in particular, this last decade has been demoralising,’’ Millar says.
‘‘Every year we get told ‘You’re not as useful and don’t contribute as much’, even though we see all around us the important role arts has played in Christchurch’s recovery. At least now we have a Minister for the Arts at the highest level in Government, showing once again what the Prime Minister takes seriously.’’
At Canterbury, for example, arts and engineering students collaborated on work by artist Len Lye and a footbridge project.
After the university removed itself from the central city in the 1970s, arts has led a tentative return with music performance and classics now based in the Arts Centre – the original university campus – and the world-famous Logie Collection now in the Teece Museum of Classical Antiquities in what used to be the Chemistry Building rather than stashed away in an academic tower at Ilam.
‘‘Personally, I’d love to see more of the College of Arts in the city,’’ Millar says. ‘‘Put a couple of thousand arts students in the heart of Christchurch and you have possibilities for all sorts of positive things to happen.’’
A week after we speak, Millar emails to say that applications to enrol in arts at Canterbury are 20 per cent higher than at the same time in 2016: ‘‘This is quite unprecedented, and suggests a major shift in our enrolment patterns occurring. It will be some time before we know to what extent this might be policyrelated.’’
As we said, signs and clues.
The flexible future
We have seen the future and it is precarious. Everyone can agree on that. Technology will take over increasing numbers of jobs now performed by human beings.
Rather than being a bribe to middleclass voters or their university-aged kids, the free fees policy had its genesis in a future of work project led by Finance Minister Grant Robertson while in opposition in 2015.
Robertson talked of wanting to ‘‘put policies in place that allow New Zealand to reap the full benefits of globalisation and changes in technology while also hedging against the potential associated risks’’, with three free years of study able to be accessed at any point in someone’s lifetime.
It sounded like a pipe dream or science fiction, with only the Opportunities Party taking future of work ideas as seriously, until Labour surprised everyone, even itself, by suddenly forming a government.
Tertiary education has been about the immediate needs of now and the next decade but ‘‘I believe this century demands a more broad-based and comprehensive type of education,’’ Millar says.
Millar has a report on his desk from the Oxford Martin School at Oxford University, titled ‘‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?’’.
He reads that ‘‘creative and social intelligence’’ will be necessary in a rapidly changing world, and he would add ‘‘cultural intelligence’’ to that list.
Words like innovation, creativity and collaboration keep being repeated.
There is an idea that the future will require us to be nimble, open-minded and able to retrain.
BusinessNZ chief executive Kirk Hope made the same point when he wrote recently that ‘‘learning will become less about ‘knowing stuff’, and more about what can be done with that knowledge’’.
Hope was responding to an Economist survey that rated New Zealand highly for its teaching of ‘‘future skills’’.
The future of work project was ‘‘not a complete blueprint,’’ Hipkins says, but it did point towards ‘‘an education system that is much more lifelong and seamless and relevant’’.
Rather than training or learning once for life, we might need to retrain a few times.
Even the Productivity Commission agreed that ‘‘the tertiary education system does not adequately cater for diverse students or encourage new models to emerge to meet evolving needs and opportunities,’’ according to a 2017 report.
The commission found there was ‘‘a high degree of central control’’ and ‘‘increasingly prescriptive funding rules’’ in the sector. Keywords regarding the future were, again, flexibility and responsiveness.
Contrast that with what Millar sees as rigidity and short-term thinking that turns students into commodities.
‘‘The pressure on them to make the right choice, plan for their future and not waste their fees is intense, so much so that for some it leads to considerable mental distress,’’ he says.
Grey has seen this at a national level, referring to ‘‘a huge problem with stress and unwellness in our students because of working too many hours and not having enough money’’.
The extra $50 a week in student allowances and student loan living costs limits already announced by Hipkins makes a difference but ‘‘we do have to be realistic about what this allowance looks like,’’ Grey says. ‘‘It’s $227. I challenge anyone to live in Wellington and go to Victoria University on that.’’
The New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations released a report in April 2017 that revealed the level of student hardship.
A 19-year-old student in Wellington wrote: ‘‘The amount of money I am able to get/borrow is barely enough to survive, but the course load is too full on to work a fulltime job. The stress is killing me.’’
With average rents for a room in Auckland at around $250 a week and student support ‘‘virtually stagnant’’, according to the Union of Students’ Associations, a third of students did not have the income to meet basic needs.
Students had to draw more and more on parental support, making higher education an increasingly upper-middleclass pursuit.
The survey found that university students are three times more likely to have gone to private schools than the wider population.
This was before the Government’s free fees and increased allowances announcements that could make higher education more accessible.
‘‘If you take a longer-term view on things,’’ Hipkins says, ‘‘the more educated the population, the more prosperous the overall society will be. The line that National Party has run around the three years free policy is ‘why should a hairdresser pay for someone else to do a law degree?’ The reality is they’re not.’’
People with a degree pay back the investment many times over, he says.
And rather than resentment, he has encountered encouragement from the working people National suddenly claims to be representing.
‘‘Some of the people we’ve met in freezing works and other places have been the most supportive of our approach to tertiary education,’’ Hipkins concludes. ‘‘They want better for their kids.’’
Especially as those meatworks jobs may one day be taken by robots.