Bryan Gould: Tertiary education getting too costly

COMMENT

These are good times for Universities Inc. Demand worldwide for a university education has never been higher. Governments around the world agree that higher education is the key to national economic performance. But the fly in this particular ointment is that not enough customers can be found willing to pay for this much-demanded product.

And university education is fearfully expensive. A cynic might say that the middle-class was prepared to pay for it through their taxes for as long as it was their offspring who took the main benefit, but have become less keen once others got in on the act. As more and more want to go to university, governments have increasingly looked to students and their families to pay the cost.

The result has been controversy wherever tuition fees have been introduced. The latest example was in Britain at the beginning of this year. When Tony Blair's Government introduced what were called "top-up fees", it had to make concession after concession to ensure the parliamentary majority it needed.

The result is a fee scheme in Britain that is hemmed in with safeguards and constraints. Poorer students will, in effect, pay no tuition fees. Universities that regard themselves as elite and are likely to charge the highest top-up fees will be made to widen access. The £3000 upper limit to top-up fees will be firmly maintained, with various safeguards to ensure that future Parliaments will not easily abandon the limit.

The protection for poorer students and the relatively light regime for repaying loans mean the British scheme can be distinguished from ours, where recent figures show how easily student loan schemes, driven by regular increases in tuition fees, can become monsters.

Here student debt has reached $6 billion and is projected to rise to more than $14 billion by 2020. Some graduates will never pay off their loan debt. The average repayment time for male students will be 13 years and for females 26 years, prompting a legal challenge designed to outlaw the scheme as discriminatory on gender grounds.

The immediate disincentive effect for potential students from poorer backgrounds is obvious. These are the ones who never show up in the statistics because they never get to university. The burden undertaken by others who end up with tens of thousands of dollars of debt as the price of a university education is equally apparent.

But we have yet to work through some of the longer-term consequences for society as a whole - the impact on family and home ownership when, for example, two graduates with a combined debt of more than $100,000 find it difficult to get a mortgage, or the loss of graduates overseas as they try to escape their debts or to help to repay them with higher overseas salaries. Do we really want to create these kinds of barriers to a better-educated society?

Anti-tuition fee rebels in Britain can be grateful they are unlikely to have to deal with such draconian outcomes, but opponents of fees in both countries will want to ask three major questions.

First, why, at a time when the importance of university education to the national future has never been clearer, is it regarded as a private good for which the individual rather than the community should pay?

If the taxpayer is required to fund compulsory education and a whole raft of other fundamental services, should the same obligations not be expected in respect of a service which equally serves the public good, is no longer the preserve of a small elite, and is now availed of by a large proportion of the population? Do we not all benefit from being a better-educated society?

Secondly, whatever safeguards are put in place, there is an obvious dissonance between the claim that governments want to improve access and their assertion that the best way of doing this is by raising the cost of university education. It seems inevitable that a significant part of the population will be deterred from going to university by the prospect of incurring a lifelong debt.

Thirdly, if some universities, by virtue of their status and reputation, are willing and able to charge more than others (and no one should place too much reliance on today's limits to fees), how can we avoid an increasing nexus between the most desirable universities and those best able to pay for access to them?

The outcome seems all too likely to be a narrowing rather than a widening of the recruitment base of our best universities - something that might be assumed to be anathema to the Governments in both New Zealand and Britain.

These questions are unavoidable for as long as governments around the world fail to recognise that tertiary education is well on the way to becoming comprehensive and universal.

It would be ironic if the persistence of the outworn view that university education is a private good enjoyed only by a privileged minority should be a self-fulfilling prejudice and result in a university system that is accessible only by those with deep pockets.

The more extensive the palliatives put in place to avoid this outcome, the more starkly revealed is the truth that the funding of university education is, or should be, a community responsibility. Why bother with increasingly expensive exceptions and safeguards that serve only to create further inequities and uncertainties and to increase the cost to the taxpayer when it would be simpler and safer to adhere to good practice, policy and principle?

* Professor Bryan Gould is vice-chancellor of Waikato University.