KEY POINTS:
It would be a welcome relief if Roger Kerr's worries about a universal student allowance come to pass.
The Business Roundtable chief executive is anxious lest Labour make an election campaign commitment to a universal student allowance so all students are helped through their studies. He attacked Labour's pledge to abolish interest payments on student loans at the last election and he's fretting about a repeat performance by way of a campaign commitment in the next few weeks.
The arguments he uses against a universal student allowance don't hold water. He claims most of the value of a tertiary education accrues to the individual student whose qualification should gain them a higher income throughout their working life.
The student therefore, so the argument goes, should pay the lion's share of the cost of that education.
So fixated on this is the Roundtable that they have previously argued for the Government to reduce its subsidy for tertiary education from around 75 per cent where it is at present, to just 25 per cent.
This would more accurately reflect the right proportion of public to private benefit, says Roger Kerr. It would also mean a trebling of course fees from present levels.
On the face of it he raises a fair point when he asks why other people who don't have a well-paying job based on a degree should subsidise the educational expenses of those who do. But it's a sound argument only if we accept that society is little more than a collection of competing individuals rather than an interdependent community.
Pensioners help pay for our schools yet may get little personal benefit from education today, while working people pay taxes to maintain national superannuation for the retired. So-called user-pays policies such as student fees work to fracture these relationships and devalue civil society.
A universal student allowance at a liveable level would be a big step forward for young New Zealanders, particularly those from low-income communities where the combined cost of tertiary fees, living expenses while studying and inability to contribute financially to the family for a number of years is a formidable barrier.
Those of us who live in middle-class suburbs have little idea of the real cost to these students and their families. A few years back when teaching in Otara I knew two students who got full-fees scholarships to attend university but who pulled out part way through their first year because their families could not afford to keep them there.
It's very common now for families on low incomes to have both parents and one or two older children all working long hours on low-pay in part-time, rostered jobs at inhospitable hours to bring in a survivable family income.
Twenty years ago many more of these families had well-paid, skilled and semi-skilled jobs in manufacturing. These jobs were destroyed, and continue to be destroyed today, by the deliberate policies of successive Labour and National Governments urged on by Roger Kerr and his corporate outriders.
These families now work the all too familiar crap jobs in the service sector and these are the same families whose children we force to borrow for tertiary education fees and living expenses to gain a decent tertiary education. The result is a $10 billion millstone of student debt around the necks of young New Zealanders.
It's a measure of the abject selfishness of the baby-boomer generation whose own parents and grandparents ensured would get every opportunity with no-fees education and living allowances while studying. A holiday job over Xmas was all the extra money needed to get through university owing nothing. The children of the wealthy are now the only ones able to avoid deep debt.
Let's hope Labour has a big plan for a universal student allowance. The cost would be about $700 million per year. It's about the same as Telecom's annual profit or a quarter of the New Zealand profit of our Australian-owned banks. Another reason why the sale of these core assets is such an ongoing disaster.
Kerr pooh-poohs the idea of a community working together to support the next generation through education, but it is worth resurrecting. A universal student allowance would help give young New Zealanders the same opportunities in education enjoyed by Roger Kerr and myself a generation ago.
* John Minto is national chairman of the Quality Public Education Coalition
