Posts by Kumara Republic
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
While that emergent class of brave new bureaucrats were initially able to bully nurses when awarding themselves free parking while introducing charges for medical staff, their resolve rapidly crumbled once the doctors got wind of the attempted shafting.
Watching the Trumpcare debacle unfold in the States, the Crown Health Enterprise experiment was a shameful attempt by Alan Gibbs & his ilk to import such a model to NZ. I recall my mother telling me not to mention the fact that my father was appointed CFO of one of them at the time.
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to stever@cs.waikato.ac.nz,
Opting to work overseas might be for the experience and more interesting work and lifestyle...but it might also be because the pay here is so poor.
And high living costs, especially in Auckland. We can thank in large part the housing bubble for that. And the self-appointed landed gentry who are willingly making it too big to fail.
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
Doesn't this tend to support the prime minister's comments that unemployed kiwis are all lazy or on drugs? And hasn't the blogo- and twitter-spheres already decided that was nonsense?
Ever thought for a moment that substance abuse is a symptom, rather than a cause, of societal malaise? And remind me again of who's profiting from drug testing in NZ.
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
It's now sixteen years since the University of Wollongong fired - and was later forced to reinstate - a staff whistleblower who went public with his concerns about the deliberate downgrading of academic standards in pursuit of foreign student cash. Strangely enough, the problem seems to persist in one form or another.
Sadly not so strange when tertiary education is perverted from a public good to a perishable good - Trump University is an obvious example. And like the housing bubble, the int'l student industry seems to be too big to fail for any meaningful reform to happen. And when a sector gets too big to fail, it's too big, period.
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Sam Bradford,
I'm an ESL teacher, so maintaining high incoming numbers is in my best interests, but I don't think it's sustainable.
I read somewhere a few years back that there were reports of foreign students commenting that they saw too many of their fellow citizens at the same tertiary institute. One deliberately studied in Wellington for that very reason.
The standard of most educational institutions (not mine) is a lot worse than Russell imagines, I think. They will pass anyone to keep the numbers up. There are students who are just there to get a visa who don't give a shit, and even worse, there are some who have spent a small fortune believing they'll get a decent qualification, who are ready to work hard, who get a worthless certificate because the course is designed to pass anyone.
It seems the Asian Financial Crisis didn't dislodge a lot of the diploma mills that had sprung up at the time.
I suspect the overall effect will be to widen inequality too, as if that weren't already a problem. The large number of 'students'/work visa holders desperate to find a job pushes down wages, and at the same time their presence raises rents and reduces rental standards. As others have mentioned, it also reduces the incentive for employers and govt. to invest in training, and we're already horrible at that and getting worse. (Try, as a building apprentice, to find a builder in Auckland who will pay more than minimum wage, not expect you to work 60-hour-weeks, and who is not literally on crack. Try it.)
Or amphetamines, for that matter? The building sector in Auckland seems highly fragmented with many small players who don't have big economies of scale.
And once again, underinvestment in training is Brexitrump accelerant when left unchecked.
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
When we hired UK people for that, they were usually hopeless in some way.
Would they have been British Leyland workers in a previous life?
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to 81stcolumn,
I think it is worse than this. Many of those who would most benefit from higher education are unable to attend in full the courses that they are paying for. They are busy trying to work at the same time. It is very difficult to succeed let alone excel under these conditions.
Couldn't agree more. It's what happens when a public good like tertiary education is reduced to a perishable good. I found that out the hard way after throwing away $25k, and now I have the scholastic equivalent of a bad credit rating. My best if not only hope now is a Scandi/German-style vocational plan that the current lot in power will likely dismiss as "reds under the bed". I hope they realise such un-thinking is what fomented Brexit & Trump in the first place.
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to poop poop,
In addition because our major export is dairy, that is a land restricted activity which won't increase with population.
And NZ has struggled to monetise its local innovators who could reduce the nation's dairy industry dependency, because most of the local investment capital has gone into the housing bubble instead of the productive sector.
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Further to my previous post, NZ is probably down there with the US on investment in labour market adjustment. Or if it is actually better, then such programmes are fragmented and not widely known.
This Chart Helps Explain Why People in the Rust Belt Are Fed Up