Entry to university should be restricted, because the problem is that most of the people who go aren’t going for reasons for economic benefit to themselves, they’re going to gain the cultural capital involved in a university degree, or they’re going because they have nothing else to do. That is, ‘first one in my family to attend university’. Which is great, unless you just waited until you were 20 and walked into a low entry barrier course without any prior education. All you did was add to the watering down of university education, because if funding is per capita then low entry barrier degrees are afraid to lose people, because they lose funding and they look bad. The current system is just loaded with perverse incentives.

It’s not like NZ society gives people with those degrees many options, either. There are barely any postgraduate transfer courses in things like law or accounting that don’t cost tens of thousands a year in tuition – for which no loans are available – and which offer a professional route to skilled graduates from outside the discipline (like the UK, for example). The current system benefits no-one. Not the individual, who’s either a good student entering a job market flooded with bad graduates all competing for the same jobs and embellishing CVs, or wider society, who now has a bunch of graduates floating around with useless degrees who can’t pay off their loans with bartending jobs. We don’t need yet another recruitment agent with a C degree in media studies. And I don’t need those people sitting in my classes and messing around with their phones and disrupting the work of the 30% or so who are capable and do care.

If, on the other hand, university entry was restricted and the per capita funding model was got rid of so that every course effectively became a closed course, the people who just went because they had nothing else to do, they’d be funneled into those professional level qualifications at polytech, or, they’d get work.

The requirement to have a degree for all kinds of ridiculous things is dragging industries down. They don’t learn much job relevance at university. I worked in finance for a long time, but I didn’t do a finance related degree. But what I noticed was that those people who did degrees, they didn’t really have a clue. They’d been taught nothing about business. And yet, emerging from the university system with a BAcc, they were somehow on paper more valuable than I was.

It would be interesting if we started funding degrees based on estimated social benefit – I’d like to see people debating it 🙂

You are 100% right – I agree. We offer the loans for opportunity reasons, the fact that the interest rate is artificially low is a transfer.

I was writing in a hurry 😀

I totally agree with your post but for this clause. We offer loans on the basis of “equalising opportunity”; making those loans interest free is exactly the kind of regressive transfer that you note should not be thought of as left wing.