Richard O'Dowd: A privilege that should be earned

It is about time someone challenged the assertion made by John Minto and others that a university education was somehow "free" before the student loans scheme came into being.

I would argue that many, if not most, students in the "good old days" of "free uni study" lived with their parents, were fed by their parents, clothed and housed by the same, and usually for all of the three to five years it takes to complete most degrees.

Those same parents, through heavy taxation (and being severely restricted on the foreign consumer products one could buy in New Zealand in the 1970s), also paid for the running of every aspect of every university in the country.

Those same parents probably made "private economies" to advance their children's interest and opportunities because that is what parents "do", or once did.

It now appears attending university is a "right" and the only restriction to entry is money.

Well, a higher education is a privilege and, like all privileges, should be earned. Financial help should be available for the brightest from modest backgrounds and actually is, if you look closely.

Maybe the poor but bright student of today should take a leaf out of the book of the "old-timers" like Minto (see link at end of article) and hit the fruit-picking and all the other menial work - during breaks - that is quite hard and tiring but definitely helps with fees.

Many do this already but many don't and of course some (the lucky and extraordinarily privileged) don't need to.

And where, John, do you get $2000 a year for bus-fares? A three-stage ticket at the student rate of $28 equals, at most, for the 30-week university year, around $850. How many students travel twice that distance every day? Even if they do it will still cost $300 less than Minto's figure.

Few students regularly travel to university during the other 20 weeks, but then maybe they are out looking for work?

I'm all for no tuition fees but it seems there are now fewer people paying enough tax to ever allow that. And would abolition of tuition fees really allow more people to attend?

How many families can now afford to have a student in the house consuming but not earning for five years or so? Certainly not the financially challenged families Minto has knowledge of.

Wealth may certainly have shifted in the past two decades but it hasn't shifted from the poor to the rich.

It has in fact shifted from the middle-class to the rich. Being poor at any time in history means just that. The condition of poverty remains the same. In the mid-1800s Irish rural poverty meant no potatoes, no food and slow starvation.

If modern poverty in New Zealand means possibly missing out on a university education and looking for work instead, that is unfortunate but not catastrophic. In fact, looking for work is a completely honourable and worthwhile thing to do and should be encouraged.

By all means scrap fees, even make university study compulsory, but it still won't be "free". Someone needs to pay and that someone will inevitably belong to the middle class. If the community desires "people's universities" that all can easily attend, so be it, but at that point those institutions will cease to be universities.

* Richard O'Dowd, a former wage earner and business owner, is now a full-time student. He does not have a student loan.