Fresh graduates have been leaving New Zealand each year, saddled with student loan debt and not looking back. File photo / Sarah Ivey
Fresh graduates have been leaving New Zealand each year, saddled with student loan debt and not looking back. File photo / Sarah Ivey
EDITORIAL:
As painstaking gains are made in prevention, containment and treatment of the Covid-19 worldwide, attention is increasingly turning to recovery.
Crucial to New Zealand's rebound is our ability to "pivot" to new enterprise. This is where we need to reverse the intergenerational exodus of our freshly graduated students.
Many of these talented ex-pats are still holding outstanding invoices from the Student Loan Scheme, funds advanced for tuition fees, living costs and other education-related costs to reduce barriers to tertiary education.
Almost three quarters of the borrowers with overdue payments in 2018/19 were overseas-based. Out of sight, out of mind, as they say. Overdue student loan debt was $1.5 billion and overseas-based borrowers owed 91 per cent of the amount overdue.
To lump them as debt-dodgers isn't accurate. It's estimated almost half, 46 per cent, of overseas-based borrowers are taking what the Ministry of Education calls "positive actions" towards repaying their student loan.
Loans are a substantial millstone for young people when they are moving into the workforce, often at the low end of the pay scale. It takes borrowers who remain in New Zealand just under six years, on average, to pay off the loan.
We've made concessions before, without fuss. The Fees Free tertiary education and training policy was introduced in 2018, whereby students beginning at a university, wānanga, institute of technology, polytechnic, or private training establishment, could get their first year of full-time study fees-free, or an equivalent amount of part-time study fees-free.
For too long, we have been a country-sized equivalent of a small town with an outmoded industry; our young remaining only long enough to graduate from short pants before catching a bus to cities of opportunity.
Now, more than ever, we need them. They want our refuge from a Covid-ravaged world.
Any who say an easement on debtors wouldn't be fair on those who stayed and paid is missing the point. Similarly moot comparisons could be drawn with any assistance package.
It's time to consider extending the fees-free principle - and to offer a more welcoming hand to student loanholders.
