Khylee Quince: Special university entry scheme vital

COMMENT

It would seem an open season for urban myth, with preferential entry quotas in tertiary education a favourite target.

National Party leader Don Brash has voiced his concern about the suitability for employment of graduates who benefited from preferential entry quotas at tertiary institutions.

Despite backtracking some days later, he maintained that there was a risk that affirmative action programmes lead to the appointment of people to jobs who are not the best applicants.

His comment then calls into question the judgment of employers, faced with graduates with equal qualifications, not the universities who provided those students with the opportunity to gain their education. His comment also misunderstands the way affirmative action programmes operate.

The so-called special treatment quotas operate at entry level only. Once admitted to a course such as law or medicine, all students must achieve standards set by the university and the official bodies of their profession. They sit the same exams and are all judged by one standard.

Why then do we have such quotas? To reflect and keep pace with the demography of a changing society, preferential entry is also available to disabled students, indigenous Pacific peoples, graduates and international students.

For Maori, two separate justifications for quotas exist, one based on the treaty relationship, the other deriving from the desire for equity in a pluralistic and multicultural society.

Historically, universities have been a poor representation of the community at large. Women, the working class and ethnic minorities have all been affected by barriers to higher education. Despite improved numbers in the 1970s to 1990s, overall enrolment for Maori students has fallen in the past five years.

University statistics confirm that despite the supposed ground-levelling phenomenon of the student loan scheme aimed at improving economic accessibility to higher education, university admission numbers from poorer decile one schools, where Maori and Pacific Island students dominate, also continue to fall.

The Polynesian population is growing at an exponential rate with an increasing gap between the makeup of the general population and that of university student enrolments. Without affirmative action this gap will continue to widen.

Research has established that there is no clear link between attendance at a wealthy high decile school and success at university.

On the contrary, students from high pressure decile 10 schools have high rates of failure and dropout in the self-motivating university environment. Entry standards on the basis of success at secondary school are therefore flawed, and perhaps serve only to efficiently cull numbers, particularly in limited-entry courses.

Further, universities should not replicate the inequities of primary and secondary education, affected by socio-economic factors that have an impact on resources. These factors strengthen the need for universities to take a wider set of variables into account when selecting for entry. Selection based on demographics may be a better approach.

There are also wider concerns about the makeup of particular professions. Maori and Pacific peoples are overrepresented on the negative side of the ledger in both criminal justice and health services. It is surely desirable that some of the lawyers, judges and doctors who have contact with our people in these contexts share similar language and culture.

In the international context, these concerns were also considered by the United States Supreme Court last year, in a case involving a constitutional challenge to the affirmative action entry scheme to the Law School at Michigan State University.

The court upheld the validity of the scheme, finding that student body diversity justified consideration of the race/ethnicity of applicants. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said that major businesses had made it clear that the skills needed in today's increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, culture, ideas and viewpoints.

Further, law schools often bred future leaders in many fields, so needed to take applicants of all backgrounds to ensure diversity.

Leaving the market to sort itself out in New Zealand meant that the first Maori woman was not admitted to the bar until the 1970s, a century after legal education was instituted at our universities. Ironically this groundbreaker was National MP Georgina Te Heu Heu, whom Dr Brash has demoted from her role as Maori Affairs spokeswoman.

Less than 30 years later, Te Hunga Roia Maori o Aotearoa (the New Zealand Maori Lawyers Association) boasts some 350 members, including judges, members of the Waitangi Tribunal, law commissioners, academics and practitioners. Many of these would not have gained entry to law school without preferential entry quotas.

Several of these graduates also went on to further study at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and other international institutions.

Despite these successes, a gap still exists between Maori and non-Maori achievement at school, requiring rectification at entry to tertiary education. Preferential entry schemes aim to fill that gap.

This treatment includes making up 50 per cent of the prison population, being 1.5 times more likely than Pakeha to be sent to prison on conviction for the same crime, 19 per cent of Maori women not having access to a telephone in the house and 40 per cent of Maori children growing up families with an annual income of less than $20,000.

It is a myth that everyone in New Zealand gets a fair go. Preferential entry schemes to universities focus on the real goal of equality - equality of outcome. Treating people the same is not to treat them equally.

* Khylee Quince is a lecturer in the faculty of law at the University of Auckland.