Posts by Lucy Stewart
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OnPoint: 3 News Exclusive Investigation…, in reply to BenWilson,
I don’t know. They exist, for sure, although “stuck” is a loaded term to describe people who don’t even try to get better work, not even within their workplace. “Secure” might be what they were actually after.
I don't know how much time you've spent in minimum-wage workplaces but "secure" isn't the word I'd use to describe it. "Just scraping by" is usually a better phrase.
Sure, there's probably some people who are okay with it (as long as they don't want kids, or other dependents, or to own any property, or have real financial security.) But I respectfully suggest that "oh, I'd have been so much happier not doing a degree and earning lots of money and living the simple life of the working poor" is a mindset that's a lot easier to have when you don't have to be one of the working poor.
And I'll say again: people like your friend earning millions are, by and large, massive statistical anomalies. Very few people get no post-school qualifications and make millions of dollars. It's just not a useful anecdote for planning your life, unless you are particularly intelligent and/or driven.
The real problem in the modern world is that we have jobs, not careers; people used to be able to go into even low-paying jobs and know they'd hold them and be promoted if they worked well. Now...not even close. (And, yes, yes, rose-tinted glasses, but the fact remains that promotion within companies has largely been replaced by chucking in people with degrees in management. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it really, really doesn't.)
A country our size could probably have five good research institutions, the rest are just teaching institutions.
I can hold out at length on the way research opportunities are linked to teaching duties without training or supervision for academic scientists, but in lieu of that: there is a strong body of thought, and I believe it, that certainly in the second and third years and sometimes in the first university courses are greatly enhanced by having people doing research teaching. It's not a set of skills everyone has, but it really does work. Sometimes you get monomaniacal focus on the teacher's particular field of interest, but more often you get a thorough introduction to a field from someone who understands it and understand current problems in it.
Even teaching-only, bachelor's degree-only institutions in the US have active researchers doing a lot of the teaching, and postdocs doing research under them. That's kind of the point of having a university, that link between extending the field of knowledge and teaching in it. I'd want to think very long and carefully before drawing any sort of separation there.
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OnPoint: 3 News Exclusive Investigation…, in reply to BenWilson,
In the same time a fairly lazy friend of mine dropped out about a month into first year, did some pretty basic minimum wage work until he found a niche, learned a trade (pest control) and has steadily built up a tidy pile of money, and is in well-paid secure work.
My question would be: for all the people like your friend (or the perennial Dropout Made Good, Bill Gates) how many are there that end up stuck in crappy minimum or close-to-minimum wage jobs all their life? I know women of my parents' generation whose families wouldn't support them to go to university (women have babies, what's the point?) and ended up in jobs that have taken twenty or thirty years to get to even 50% above *minimum* wage. They're not stupid or unmotivated, quite the opposite - they've perfected what they do, but what they do just doesn't pay that well. Tertiary education would probably have given them opportunities they didn't get. For everyone who drops out and does well there are a lot more who don't, because succeeding under those circumstances takes innate skills that not everyone has or develops on their own.
For people going into computer science today, for instance - sure, if you just want to be a programmer, your best bet is a polytech industry-based course. CPIT in Christchurch has (or did have) a very, very good one. But if you want to do something specialised or the really well-paying jobs, a degree can pan out. My partner is being courted in the US for jobs that theoretically require five to ten years' experience in industry. He handed in his thesis just under a year ago. His Master's apparently lets them overlook the experience gap (obviously there's also other factors at play, he's good at what he does, but it helps a lot.) It's a fringe case but it's real. But there's also people who come out totally unemployable because their degrees were mostly theory-based, or have good degrees but can't break that magical "two years' experience" barrier.
I think this all gets back to the way a bachelor degree has become seen as a base requirement for any sort of non-trade skilled work: it isn't, and shouldn't be, but that's the perception. Right now, there are lots of jobs that a degree does give you an advantage for and is useful for, but we need to give young people more certainty about what path they're taking and what the results are likely (not guaranteed, but likely) to be. Because right now it's a bit of a crapshoot, except in specific areas. It's not as bad as "there's no point", but it is "if you're going into this to make yourself more employable, then think about what you're doing."
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Up Front: Absence in the Arcades, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
The video felt liked it breezed past the CTV site. What are they planning to do there?
I imagine a lot of thought and planning is going into that, and it won't be a quick decision*. I didn't feel like the video breezed past it; I thought it lingered as long as it needed to. I mean, what do you say? The PGC building site *did* get breezed past, I'm not sure the cameraman even managed to film it.
*Translation: a lot of thought and planning better bloody be going into that.
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OnPoint: 3 News Exclusive Investigation…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
BUT it would feel a lot like penalising graduates for learning skills we actually want in society in general. That might be an issue.
I reckon you could sell a 1% tax rise way easier than student loans (if it were a replacement for them.) In effect, it wouldf *be* almost a straight top income tax rise, since a large majority of people earning over $50Kish will have gone to university, but it's an encouragement to follow career paths which are equally lucrative but don't require degrees. Not a terrible idea, if you could get it through Parliament.
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OnPoint: 3 News Exclusive Investigation…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
And often those slightly older (more mature?) students perform really well.
I had actually understood that people who entered under adult entry (by virtue of being over 20) had much higher non-completion rates than people who got in with UE at 18. (Would love to see some stats either way, couldn’t find any with cursory Googling.)
I imagine there are some who do very well, having learned to learn, but a lot of others who didn’t pass UE, waited around until they qualified by age, and still hadn’t picked up the learning skills they needed. By and large I think requiring *some* sort of preparatory course for people without UE – whether through the university or at another tertiary institution – is probably a good idea.
I’m assuming that would be an issue related to Scholarships, and I’m not sure what the qualification status is of those these days. Certainly it’s fair to say that NCEA in practice only goes up to L3
They must have changed something, though, because I remembered also that my official UC transcript says I was admitted to university by virtue of having passed NCEA Level 4. It may not be a *common* thing (and it certainly wasn't in my year, which was the one where only 90-odd people passed Scholarship Chemistry, 30-odd Scholarship Physics, 9 people Scholarship Biology, etc, countrywide, due to some really whacked-out marking rubrics) but it was definitely A Thing.
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OnPoint: 3 News Exclusive Investigation…, in reply to NBH,
(Oh, and a small correction – NCEA only goes up to Level 3)
Then how come I have a rather official-looking certificate saying I passed NCEA Level 4? Or have they switched up how the Scholarship-level subjects work since I was a guinea-pig?
I don’t know that that’s actually true – the work that Stats NZ and the Ministry of Education have done in outcomes from 3ry Ed seem to show a pretty strong incomke premium for law degrees compared to other qualification areas right out of the gate (when results are less likely to be subject to significant distortion from high earners)
Quite possibly - I was lazily going by stats I'd read on American law graduates, where there is a massive disparity between average and median income. I'd be curious if that remains the case (looking at median, obviously) after some time in the industry.
This sort of situation is one of the reasons why I’m in favour of a graduate tax as a partial solution to the funding conundrum.
Taxed by qualification, or just a flat grad tax? As the system stands that could really rort some people. By qualification is tricky, too. Seems much easier to just raise top-level income tax rates.
And in some ways you could say the student loan system *is* a tax on graduates, albeit one that applies equally regardless of your success or failure. I could also see a nice peverse incentive for people to do a Steve Joyce and all-but-complete degrees, if an extra tax were imposed upon formal graduation.
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OnPoint: 3 News Exclusive Investigation…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Limit university entrance based on how many students we can afford to pay for through taxation and then select on merit.
I think this is the one that people choke on, because it's meritocratic rather than egalitarian. It is inherently unpalatable to suggest that there are a lot of people who don't get much out of university, who never will, and whose time and energy is far better spent advancing their skills in other ways (other tertiary courses, on-the-job-training, etc.) But I think it's pretty much true. Of course, I would say that, because the university system suits me just fine, but when you look at the non-completion levels it's fairly obvious that university as it is doesn't work for a lot of people.
But if we're seriously going to do that, we need to find a way to move businesses away from using a university degree as a first-order screening tool. That's what the later levels of college should be for - NCEA Level 3 and/or 4 should be a meaningful qualification, not just a get-into-university pass.
In short we push our best and brightest to become lawyers and doctors, even if they were the next great author or the next great biologist or the next great chemist.
Which is why we have a massive surplus of people with law degrees (who, contrary to popular belief, don't earn that much of a premium if you look at the bulk of law graduates rather than the few successful ones who drag up the average.) That said, we've still got to find a way to increase industries that employ the next great scientists.
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OnPoint: 3 News Exclusive Investigation…, in reply to linger,
OTOH, I do have some considerable sympathy for that reaction, because the country may arguably have "made some investment" in the individual's training -- but in many cases, no investment in guaranteeing local jobs using the resulting knowledge & skills; and once you start to commodify education by placing a monetary value on it, you are basically encouraging students to view it as theirs rather than the country's, regardless of who ends up paying for how much of it.
A lack of investment in creating jobs is certainly a fair criticism. While I didn't do a great deal of job-hunting post university in NZ, being focused on the move to a postgrad degree, there's definitely a lot of people out there who do degrees in the full expectation that they'll be able to pay it back with the increased job opportunities they'll gain and then find those opportunities only exist overseas. Why people go, I understand.
And I do think the current student loan system probably is unsustainable in the levels of debt it entails. I have a less-than-average student loan, but it's still a substantial amount, even though I got nearly a full scholarship for five years of uni and had considerable parental investment and found a permanent part-time job and jobs every summer. I think people who grew up in generations without student loans really do underestimate the sense of futility about "adult life" that this sort of debt can induce - you can't even really think about kids or a mortgage until you've been working for a few years, assuming you get a decent job (i.e. one at or significantly above the median income). We have to find better ways to do this. That includes not making a BA or BSc a minimum requirement for any sort of non-labouring job, when it's not necessary. And making part-time and night-school tertiary education more accessible.
That being said, I still don't have sympathy for people who can afford to pay it back, without hardship, and choose not to. Regardless of how they feel about it, the country did make an investment in them, and I think it's pretty low to take that and run. Taking overseas income levels into account is probably going to be hard, but in the interests of fairness, it's worth doing.
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OnPoint: 3 News Exclusive Investigation…, in reply to Idiot Savant,
If its been more than a decade, I think we've already established that they will not and can not pay.
Unless they're living overseas, in which case you're essentially bribing them to come back (stay overseas long enough and your student loan vanishes!). I'm gonna guess that's not an insignificant proportion of that 30%. Your argument definitely has relevance for people who are living in New Zealand and have never had income over the threshold, but if someone wants to take the investment the country has made in them and trade it in for a better living overseas, without repaying the loan - well, my sympathies are at best limited.
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OnPoint: 3 News Exclusive Investigation…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I totally assumed that it was a joke. Did you not?
What - the bit about his unmatched travails going through law school, or laughing at people with student loans? The humour is difficult to discern either way.