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Salient. Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 42 No. 7. April 9 1979

Other Problems

Other Problems

But even if we were to harden our hearts to the prospects of students becoming the best friends of every finance company in the country, there are many other objections to the loans scheme. In particular it commits students to rush out to work in New Zealand as soon as they finish their degrees. This means that the many students who shoot off overseas for several years after graduation before "settling down" would now, if they wished to go overseas, have to skip the country and would probably never be allowed to return. Clearly this benefits no-one.

Other students, rather than shooting off into the wild blue yonder, become temporarily involved in a variey of activities which have nothing to do with the vocation they have mapped out for themselves. Activities like student politics (and student newspapers), community work to give just two examples. With a massive debt looming overhead, few students would be able to take a year off to become involved in these often poorly paid activities.

But as well as affecting the life-style an future aspirations of individual students, loans will have a marked effect on the [unclear: stuture] of our Universities.

If one enters university takes out substantial loans in anticipation of gaining a well-paid job on leaving university, what courses are likely to be favoured?

Financial considerations, for all but the very wealthy, will preclude the study of those general subjects like English. History, Language, Philosophy. Those degrees that don't place students in a leading position in the race to scoop up the $20,000 a year jobs are likely to be ignored.

Another form of hardship is imposed on students who want to go on to complete other degreees, second degrees or honours degrees. According to bursary regulations many of these combinations are expected to take five or six years to complete I haven't got around to calculating what the total debt would be at the end of such a period, but a figure of around $6000 or $700 seems not unrealistic.

While our bursary system is riddled with anomolies, the level is wrong and the abatement iniquitous, the concept of a "grant in aid" is far superior to one of loans. With a bursary soms students are excessively advantaged. Under a loans system, the wealthy won't be able to live off the fat of the system, but this is done by making poorer students suffer considerable hardship. Because of the greater flexibility it allows students in their selection of courses, duration of study, and what they do when they leave university, students should now be sucked in by the rhetoric of Levett and others on loans. The end result of loans [unclear: wil] be to make tertiary education even morel [unclear: el] list and less humane than it is at present.

Peter Beach