by frog
Yesterday’s discussion about tertiary debt focused heavily on the stereotypical law, medicine or business students, forgetting at times that there are many thousands of student studying hairdressing, plumbing, nursing and other skills or trades. (And let’s not forget that there is no such thing as stereotypical law, medicine or business student who can easily pay back their debt.) Just receiving a tertiary education does not guarantee wealth later in life.
It is quite possible to be wealthy without having studied at a tertiary institute, or poor with numerous years of study – but still contributing importantly and valuably to your community.
If people really believe that education is a private good then surely those who invest in it should pay for it once they get the financial return – i.e. once the higher wages eventuate (otherwise known as progressive taxation).
On the other hand, if it is a public good, and our country is better off having qualified plumbers, nurses, and lawyers going about their business then the only limits we should be placing in front of people wanting to pursue those professions should be limits based on academic ability rather than the depth of their pockets, their gender, age or ethnicity.
We’ve had nearly two decades of student debt now. Student support was one of the many hospital passes that the Labour Alliance Government received from National in 1999. But since then Labour’s record has hardly be inspiring. It knew that debt was a problem, so it stuck a ‘no interest’ band aid on it. But that’s done nothing to solve the underlying problem. Students still need to borrow just to live.
And the result has flowed through in all sorts of unpredicted ways.
Yesterday Sue Kedgley noted that 20% of doctors at Southland were locums, seeking the higher pay that it came with being a locum.
“When 20 percent of the medical workforce is filled by locums, many working for only a few days or weeks at a time, this raises serious concerns around continuity of care, patient safety, and the viability of our medical workforce.”
This seems like ‘rational’ behaviour from the doctors’ when they’ve been told their education is a private good and their debt is a private debt that they need to pay off on their own. But the Southland DHB, meaning taxpayers, are paying a 25% premium for short term locum doctors. So was how much are we really saving by charging students massive fees and denying them a fair living allowance?
Published in Economy, Work, & Welfare by frog on Thu, March 6th, 2008
Tags: , allowances, Debt, doctors, Education, locums, southland DHB, student debt, students, Sue Kedgley, Tertiary
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
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??! Explain how you get from student support to locums…
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Here’s the link: Doctors with massive debts are changing the way they behave as a consequence of that debt. Check this out from a locum doctor writing in the New Zealand Medical Journal:
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either/or fallacy. you’re essentially saying a student must borrow & study full time or not study at all. obviously they can work & study part time & not have to borrow. to repeat my previous point i learn from the internet but i don’t expect the government to pay me a living wage to do that.
making education avaialable for free is one thing, paying people to undertake the eduction quite another.
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it’s also possible to be poor without having studied at a tertiary institute but still contributing importantly & valuably to your community.
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Having a couple of friends in the industry I suspect that the locum lifestyle is also much more attractive than being a “full time” doctor. It’s possible to make a reasonable living as a part time locum working only 50 or 60 hours a week, when a full time position is typically 80 hours or more. To many people, 50 or 60 hours is a hell week, let alone 80. Hence the reluctance of many new doctors to continue selling their whole lives to their chosen profession.
I have one friend who has been a “permanent part time registrar” since just after they graduated about 20 years ago. Sure, they only earn about $80,000 a year but they also only work 40 hours a week. Admittedly they do really ugly shifts, often their 40 hours is from Friday afternoon until Monday morning, but still. That’s a trade-off I’m sure many of us would be willing to make.
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Andrew- having recently been a student I can assure you that full-time tertiary education barely leaves room for work, and work is not guaranteed to cover living expenses for everyone even after student allowances and/or support from parents, and many of said students live distressingly close to poverty.
If students did not have time-intensive courses with short deadlines on them, then this would be less of a problem and they could hold down part-time or perhaps even full-time employment steadily. However most tertiary education is the equivalent of a full-time job on its own, and this effectively means that if we want a skilled workforce we may have to bite the bullet and accept that this means supporting young undergraduates in a slightly wider sense than our current meagre offerings to very few.
“Paying” people to learn would imply they’re making a profit, rather than often cutting the budget close just for living costs, and still getting themselves into crippling debt simply to pay for tuition.
I agree we shouldn’t be paying people who can support themselves, but the current method of assuming that parents are responsible for living costs during university clearly isn’t working and puts students unsupported by wealthy parents at a disadvantage.
But suggesting that students are running off with a profit in any case when we pay some of their living costs is not true. They government already pays a very small amount to those without relatively wealthy parents- and nobody suggests that these students are giving us a bad deal out of the bargain.
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the government pays people to dig ditches & yet some of them are only just covering living costs and not making a “profit” – whatever that might mean in the context of wage income.
ari, it’s not me saying students must study full time or not at all. please review my first post
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The issue all boils down to how much money the government is prepared to spend on tertiary education.
In the past, fewer students went to university, so almost free education with students getting a living allowance was cheaper than it would be today.
Maybe one approach would be to have a limited (but still reasonable) number of merit based scholarships which would pay the cost of tertiary education, and also a reasonable living allowance? This would not necessarily be counter-productive in terms of training a skilled work-force. Maybe more emphasis (and money) should be placed on polytechs, apprenticeships etc?
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“i learn from the internet but i don’t expect the government to pay me a living wage to do that.”
Yes, but you won’t get a piece of paper to prove you have learned anything, so employers or higher education establishments won’t want you. This came home ot me when one of my colleagues, a gifted cartoonist, and an artistic genius was refused entry into teachers college classes teaching art because he did not have a degree in art, in spite of being far more talented than the art graduates on the course.
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