Dialogue: Curtain falls on tertiary choices

By JOHN ROUGHAN

One winter night a year or two ago I went inside the private tertiary education sector. It was surprisingly warm once you found it.

The address, in a back street of Parnell, turned out to be a low-rent commercial building with no ivy on the walls, no Latin inscription over the portal.

In fact, the entrance was dark and firmly locked, although this was the advertised open night for all those interested in the next nine-month course. I was there to see what my son was getting into.

After a few hollow blows on the door, I wandered around the back and found an opening leading to a narrow stairway. In dim light at the top of the stairs, an empty room with a whiteboard and a scattering of cast-off school chairs suggested this had to be the place.

There were more doors, some locked, others going nowhere, until eventually one door opened against the backs of people and I squeezed into a crowded room.

About 50 people, overwhelmingly young, mostly male, were listening to a tutor sitting with his back to a recording console. A darkened sound studio could be seen through the glass in the side wall.

The youths were rapt. They hung on every word. And this is what that tutor was telling them:

They were not to take this course believing they would walk into a job at the end of it. This was a hard industry. At the end of the course perhaps a handful of them might get the chance to hang around one of Auckland's few recording studios, make coffee, run errands.

They would not, of course, be paid. If they managed to hang around, watch, learn and make themselves useful, there just might come a day when somebody was away and they were asked to help out on the console.

The youths were still rapt. In every eye they were the one with the lucky break. That's how it happens, the tutor said. If it happens, he added.

He knew that nothing he said would discourage them. The audio engineering course had two intakes a year and it was always full.

Those kids always come to mind when I hear university staff complain that some of the tertiary education budget goes to private training centres these days.

And I wonder where Associate Education Minister Steve Maharey has been when he warns that there will be less for the private sector once the Government gets control of the funds.

Whatever, the taxpayer was contributing to that course and those kids were putting up a princely sum themselves, probably borrowed against their hopes.

Their fees were far higher than those that bring so much bleating from the university students' associations. You could probably get four years at a polytechnic for the cost of those nine months.

But then, the trainees, if they had been anywhere near a polytechnic, probably preferred an intensive, practical nine months to four years of padding. The Government thinks differently.

This week's Budget brought the curtain down on competition in tertiary education. Public money will no longer necessarily follow students' preferences. Their preferences, sayeth the Government, have left shortages in important corners of the labour market.

People like Steve Maharey and Michael Cullen are ever ready to declare a market failure where they do not like the choices people make. A little bit of intellectual humility would serve us better.

Those kids were breaking every rule of rationality in the labour market. They knew there were precious few jobs for the knowledge and skills they were seeking. They were behaving exactly as many students at university do.

How many people, particularly younger people, really take note of gaps in the labour market when they take a course of education? They would be extremely unwise to do so if the course lasted more than a year or so. Markets can change quickly.

But even on short courses many of the trainees are probably there because they are following their heart's desire. Nothing more, nothing less. They are wise to do that.

To invest in one's interests, aptitudes, loves is a far better bet than a transient skill shortage. Interests, aptitudes, loves are the individual's keys to a fruitful life. I suppose few if any of those on that audio engineering course are in the recording industry today but I doubt that any regret the effort they made.

People seldom do. The knowledge they collect of the world all contributes somehow to their productive lives.

Today's Labour politicians are the last people who need convincing of any of this. Most of their leading lights were graduates in fields that were never particularly fertile labour markets. And they are normally among the most fervent to avow that an economy is about people and that people come first. They are so right.

It would be more accurate to say an economy is people. It starts with people using their interests, aptitudes and loves to fashion things that they can exchange. They may need education, financial capital, land, equipment and help to fashion those things. But it starts with people.

And their inclinations are so varied and distinct that there is no case for restricting the variety of education available.

The Government's designs for control of the tertiary sector have little to do with market shortages, particularly if it means to divert funds from private providers who are the most likely to run short courses capable of plugging the gaps.

Its motive in most things is to protect the state sector. For that, private tertiary educators may soon lose their livelihood, and students their choice.

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