Auckland University students block traffic at the intersection of Symonds St, Grafton Rd and Alfred St during a protest against changes to the student loans scheme, 2012. Photo / Steven McNicholl
Auckland University students block traffic at the intersection of Symonds St, Grafton Rd and Alfred St during a protest against changes to the student loans scheme, 2012. Photo / Steven McNicholl
OPINION:
Education is a passport. It's the ticket to exploring our world and our histories, to growing and challenging our ideas, to navigating global pandemics and solving climate change.
Across the political divide, it seems we can all agree that education is critical for the wellbeing and productivity of our country.
The problem is, we have very differing views on whether someone should have to carry a lifetime of debt or suffer immense poverty, for their right to learn.
In environmental circles, most people are familiar with the allegory of the boiling frog.
It says that if a frog were thrown immediately into a pot of boiling water, it would react and jump out to save itself.
But if the frog were placed in cool water, the temperature slowly turned up, it would not perceive the rising threat until it was far too late.
Despite fits and starts of protest, that frog is largely the state of the tertiary student experience over the last 30 years.
Trying to progress this discussion and ask if we would like to do better as a nation, a number of commentators and politicians tell me that it's always been the case that students have struggled. Nothing's new, they'll say.
Let's have a look at some of the things that have changed in the last 30 years, then.
Student debt didn't exist before the 1990s. Before I was born, the cost of access to tertiary education was a nominal fee – akin to, say, the administration costs for a passport – that nobody need take out a loan for.
By 2004, average domestic student fees in Aotearoa across tertiary education institutions were NZ$2367. By 2019, they had increased 81 per cent, to an average of $4294 per equivalent full-time earner.
In 1992, the year after student loans were introduced following the let-rip of free-market competition, the average borrowed per year per student was $3628; by 2019, it had increased by 172 per cent, to $9867.
In 1999, 62,748 students received the Student Allowance. In 2021, despite our population growing by a million, 61,068 – yes, fewer than in 1999 – received the Student Allowance.
In 1999, the average amount of Student Allowance received per eligible student was $4420. In 2021, it was $6641. Adjusted for inflation, which would bring the 1999 value to approximately $8265, the minority of students receiving the allowance in 2021 are $1600 worse off than their counterparts 20 years ago.
A young boy joins students protesting outside the Auckland Central Police Station. Photo / Dean Purcell
We all know costs haven't gone down in the meantime.
People sometimes ask me why students aren't protesting this nonsense as we saw in mass student movements of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. We're back at the boiling frog.
One of the biggest temperature leaps was the 2011 passing by the National, Act and United Future majority in Parliament of Voluntary Student Membership. Ninety-eight per cent of submissions had opposed the Bill.
The demolition of automatic representation and belonging to a student union – much like, say, automatic citizenship or belonging to a local council's remit of responsibility – has decimated funding to student associations, their membership and their capacity to organise, let alone build institutional knowledge and campaigns.
These past five years that I've been working with student associations to fight for better outcomes, I've been astounded at how much time and energy is taken up fundraising for money to perform basic functions.
Throughout Covid, while wage subsidies were provided directly to hundreds of thousands of impacted businesses, students were required to beg their institutions for access to the "Hardship Fund for Learners".
Many who were declined ended up turning to their student union. Many student unions had to reallocate funds from core functions to support their students, no questions asked on voluntary membership, despite their institutions, not the unions, receiving tens of millions of dollars for the hardship fund.
While we've had some successes these last few years, like the Student Accommodation Inquiry leading to the first-ever Domestic Pastoral Care Code and recourse for inexcusable experiences, the frog is still boiling.
Petition after the protest, Parliament largely refuses to act.
That's why this week we did something unprecedented, working with student unions – led by the New Zealand Union of Students' Associations (NZUSA), Te Mana Ākonga, Tauira Pasifika and the National Disabled Students' Association among 33 student unions – to launch a People's Inquiry into Student Experiences and build the organising infrastructure to demand action, now.
We're asking the things StudyLink won't do in order to take back the political power governments have spent decades undermining.
• Chloe Swarbrick, Green Party, is the MP for Auckland Central
