International Socialists

Brian Roper looks at continued attacks on tertiary education

 

 

It may seem strange to refer to New Zealand's universities as degree factories but this is precisely what they have become as a result of 18 years of neoliberal educational policy. The Public Finance Act of 1989, in conjunction with the State Sector Act 1988 and the Education Act 1989, forced the universities to model themselves on a neoliberal idealised view of the private firm.

 

Universities now have annual reports and corporate plans, they compete with each other for "market share," and are managed by Vice Chancellors whose salaries have skyrocketed to over $300,000 per annum. Students are "input" to the degree factory and degrees are the "output."
 

Unmitigated disaster

The outcome has been an unmitigated disaster. Government funding for universities has been provided on the basis of a certain amount of money per Effective Full Time Student (EFTS). This has forced universities to waste a huge amount of time and money on advertising and other schemes to attract students. Even worse it has created a nasty competitive environment within universities because each department has been forced to compete with other departments in related disciplines for students. Academic and general staff thus have to waste time helping out with advertising, visiting schools, and so forth. And far from cooperating with each other in teaching and research, departments have been forced to try and "get one over" their "competitors" at every turn.
 

Bureaucracy

Within the universities the level of bureaucracy has increased tremendously, and academics are chronically over-managed. For example, at the University of Otago in 1990 the management structure was small and relatively flat with a Vice Chancellor, Deans of Faculty, and Heads of Departments. Now there are two Deputy Vice Chancellors, Assistant Vice Chancellors, Deans, Sub Deans, Heads of Departments, and Heads of Programmes. The same kind of thing has been happening in all of the universities - management has been eating up a steadily rising proportion of each university's resources (money, staff, office space etc.)

 

At the same time that the number of staff employed in management has increased dramatically, staff to student ratios have deteriorated, and workloads for both general and academic staff have increased substantially throughout the university system. To make matters worse, "Academic salaries have fallen dramatically behind both earlier and current benchmarks and have not kept pace with domestic inflation. Since 1990, a backbench MP's salary has increased by 37%, a secondary teacher's by 28%, and a university lecturer's by 15%. The consumer price index for that period totalled 25%. Staff salary increases in the university sector last year ranged between 1.5 and 1.7% while [inflation] increased by over 3%" (TEAC, Shaping the Funding Framework, p.17).
 

Rising fees

Despite the fact that university staff have been forced to do more work for less money, students have faced steeply rising fees. Even the above report admits that: "Average tuition fees from 1990 (when significant tuition fees were first introduced) to 1999 have increased for an initial degree programme from $1,250 per annum to more than $3,000 per annum. Partly as a result, average student loan debt increased substantially from 1992 to 1999, and is forecast to continue increasing."

 

The major reason that fees have gone up, forcing students into debt, is that government funding per student has gone down. Government funding per Effective Full Time Student (EFTS) has declined in real terms from $8,446 in 1991 to $6,423 in 1999. During the same period average course fees went up from $1,538 to $3,316. (All figures are expressed in 1991 dollars). You do not have to be a rocket scientist to work out what's going on here! As the report observes: "On a per-EFTS basis, the decrease in government funding has been almost entirely offset by an increase in tuition fees, once inflation is taken into account."

The overall result has been a growing mountain of student debt.

 

According to the Ministry of Education Student Loan Scheme Annual Report to 30 June 2001 total student debt had reached $4.143 billion. By 2000 on average each university student was borrowing $6,878 per year. 274,891 students had been forced into debt by 2000 and this number has continued to rise. Total student debt is projected to reach $10.2 billion by 2009/10, $13.4 billion by 2014/15 and $16.1 billion by 2020 (TEAC estimates $19.3 billion by 2020 if current government policy is maintained).
 

Unfair

Student debt is a highly unfair way of funding tertiary education because it reinforces existing inequalities in society. Students who are women, and/or Mäori, and/or from working class backgrounds take far longer to repay the debt. Rich white male students don't need to borrow at all.

 

The Labour/Alliance Government is committed to changing the funding of tertiary education. It set up the Tertiary Education Advisory Commission (TEAC) to comprehensively review the system, and the TEAC reports will lay the foundation for the government's educational policy. The big problem is that the recommendations of the key report by TEAC - Shaping the Funding Framework - focus mainly on shifting the existing funding regime from being purely EFTS based to a combination of EFTS and funding tied to research output. In other words, tinkering with the current neoliberal setup rather than advocating real changes to it.
 

Problems remain

All of the major problems will remain: fees and debt, deteriorating staff/student ratios, falling staff salaries and increasing workloads, and a competitive market model that wastes university resources. We in the International Socialists argue that this is not good enough. What is required is a return to the situation that prevailed for most of the postwar years - no significant fees, no debt, adequate living allowances for students, salary increases that keep up with the rate of inflation, and universities funded through a system of progressive taxation in which those who benefit most from their education in terms of income pay most. In short, barrier free education funded through progressive taxation.

 

Such a system would be both more efficient because revenue collection is centralised and doesn't require a bureaucratic apparatus separate from Inland Revenue, and much fairer because students don't have to pay up-front fees and get into huge amounts of debt.
 

Real change

Real change in tertiary education will never be achieved by simply voting for Labour, the Alliance or the Greens. However, it can be fought for and won through direct mass action by students and staff. The mass student occupations of the 1990s did not defeat the neoliberal drive towards "user pays" education, but they did succeed in slowing it down and preventing the full blown privatisation of our universities. Recent industrial action by university staff has forced management to come up with pay increases that come closer to keeping up with inflation than was achieved in most of the settlements reached during the 1990s.

 

The persistent underfunding of education by this Government means that further action of this kind is essential and likely. Strikes, protests, occupations: this is how to fight for positive change in education.