Posts by NBH
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OnPoint: 3 News Exclusive Investigation…, in reply to linger,
Oh yeah, those rates don't relate to whether people are getting what they want out of study - I was just responding to Lucy's note above that she'd be interested in stats on the topic. It is worth noting though, that the situation is the same for both qualification completion (completing a BA) and course completion (passing ANTH 101). If mature students are more skilled at learning but many don't intend to get a degree, you'd still expect course completion rates to be higher than those for younger learners.
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FWIW, I had a spare minute and followed up whether mature students do have a better completion rate than younger students on the thoroughly excellent Education Counts website . NZ doesn't (as far as I'm aware) have a distinct marker for 'mature' in its official datasets, but from looking at the course and qualification completion rates by age for degree-level study it looks like Lucy's right, and older students don't have better completion rates than younger ones.
ETA:
New Zealanders are considered Australian Commonwealth residents for postgraduate study purposes, and thus receive a full fees scholarship for any research degree. This is hardly known, and thus underutilised.
Absolutely, and this is another area where right-wing rhetoric about needing to be competitive with Australia is for some reason curiously absent.
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10's a PhD (http://www.nzqa.govt.nz/studying-in-new-zealand/nzqf/understand-nz-quals/) - but in practice at degree level and above the framework is more theoretical than anything else, since the universities have never really bought into the idea of it (being exceptionally resistant to the idea of competency-based education that underpins the framework).
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Progressive tax coupled with universal provision is the way we used to deal with the costs of education
Not with regard to university education – there it used to be progressive tax coupled with pretty restricted provision. :-)
Much of the student debt can be attributed to the sky-high bar for the student allowance (“borrowing to eat”), rather than actual tuition fees
This is a bit misleading – according to the most recent annual report on the scheme, in 2010 only 48% of borrowers accessed the living costs component (compared to 93% who borrowed to pay fees) and living costs only accounted for 25% of the amount borrowed in that year. You’re right that the student allowance scheme is a mess though. One of my personal bugbears is that the effective marginal tax rate for earning above the weekly threshold is over 100% (each cent you earn before tax over the repayment threshold reduces your allowance by the same before tax amount). Yet strangely the same people who whinge about interest-free student loans ignore that particular piece of economic lunacy…
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OnPoint: 3 News Exclusive Investigation…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
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'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 - especially since NZQA itself says that "There are three levels of NCEA certificate": http://www.nzqa.govt.nz/qualifications-standards/qualifications/ncea/understanding-ncea/how-ncea-works/ncea-levels-and-certificates/ :-) Note that you can use credits from standards at higher levels of the qualifications framework (which theoretically goes up to 10) to meet the requirements of NCEA.
In terms of grad tax - with the proviso that this is my leaning rather than any sort of concrete plan or idea - I'd be thinking of a small (0.5-1%) across the board tax increase for all those with degrees or higher. That means that for early graduates the repayment equivalent taken out of their pay would be miles lower than the rates for student loans (which the GT would largely replace), while ensuring that there would be a constant contribution throughout someone's life - the specialist tax lawyer earning hundreds of thousands per year would still be making a contribution that recognises the private benefit they obtained from their qualification years after they would have repaid their student loan. Regarding equity issues, you could say that it only cuts in at the $48K+ income category.
I don't think the "all-but-complete" would be an issue for a couple of reasons (including the performance measures in our current funding system), but the most significant is simply that not having a qualification means that you'll lose out on future opportunities for employment, study etc. What it would do, I think, is make people think twice about going into degree-level study as a default option, and make other pathways (like the traditional trade and technician occupations, where I think it's near-universally acknowledged we have a significant skills policy problem) a more attractive option.
As I say though, this is more of a half-formed idea than My Five-Year Plan For Tertiary Education, and it would need to be part of a broader overall reform of both provider funding and student support systems. I also acknowledge that it's an idea that realistically doesn't have the faintest chance of being implemented. :-)
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OnPoint: 3 News Exclusive Investigation…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
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.
You might be happy to learn that this is actually happening. The vocational pathways idea developed a couple of years ago by the Industry Training Federation was formally adopted as government policy at the beginning of the year – and has buy-in across the political spectrum as far as I’m aware – and is now in the process of being implemented, with leadership from the industry skills bodies (ITOs).
(Oh, and a small correction – NCEA only goes up to Level 3).
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.)
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). In fact that’s one of the problems with the current system – law is a comparatively cheap qualification (thus leadign to lower student loans) with comparatively high potential returns. 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.
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Apologies for my apparent lack of faith, Graeme! :-)
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Looking at the lists, it's interesting that National only has candidates ranked up to 65. I would've thought that there's a possibility that they'll end up being entitled to more seats than that (allowing for below-the-threshold votes presumably that'd require around 55% of votes). Does anyone know what happens in that case?
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Following that link out of morbid curiosity, I discovered that their Deputy Leader's name is Sean Fitzpatrick. Given that their opening address was authorised by Robert Palmer, I'm wondering if the Libz have adopted an unorthodox electoral strategy that involves every party member renaming themselves after their favourite celebrity and hoping that voters get confused.
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Dyan, please don't take this the wrong way, but I don't really see anything in that letter that hasn't been talked about for a fairly long time in public health, nutrition etc. circles already. I agree with a lot of what you describe - and obviously don't have the context that you do for this discussion - but given that these ideas do have pretty widespread currency I think it's a pretty harsh call to accuse SPARC of stealing them. What were the specific actions they proposed/pursued that you had issues with?