Whatever happened to the meritocracy?

With student debt in New Zealand rapidly rising, and students taking longer to pay back their debts, one might think more politicians would be asking whether so many students should actually be going to university.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was a massive surge in the numbers of students attending higher education, and a correspondingly rapid increase in student tuition fees. In keeping with overseas trends, both Labour and National claimed this increase in enrolments was essential for the country's "knowledge economy."

Whether this surge in university enrolments was really necessary is debatable, unemployment was rapidly increasing at the time and perhaps many young people didn't know what else to do, although technological changes were increasing the need for a more educated workforce.

However, that was then and this is now. Today unemployment is running at about 3 percent and there's a fair supply of jobs, often paying relatively high wages, which do not require an academic degree, and can be learned either on the job or through combined work and study courses at technical colleges.

Unfortunately though, the government and the universities are still committed to outdated principles of egalitarianism and market populism, which are failing both students and the culture/economy of the country as a whole.

In a meritocracy, access to university should be based not on ability to pay, but on ability to pass, yet this cannot be guaranteed if places are offered to students who lack the aptitude, commitment and intellectual curiosity to complete a university degree.

This is an issue that the British Conservative party is at least tentatively addressing, but which still seems to be taboo in contemporary New Zealand politics. Every student who fails a course, increases the cost of a university education for other students, yet universities continue to offer places to students who have not done sufficiently well at school to warrant access to a university.

Egalitarians claim testing is unfair on adult students who have left school some time ago, but this can be be overcome by assessing adults students using aptitude tests instead of scholastic exams.

Not only are intelligent, hard-working students from working and lower middle-class backgrounds incurring heavy debts, because they have to subsidise lazier or less intelligent students, including a few upper-middle class airheads, but they're also having to subsidise students taking academically soft subjects of little cultural or commercial value.

Dumb-downed subjects like American studies, and pseudo-academic subjects like Communications, add little to the cultural or economic vitality of the country, yet are popular with students looking for an easy pass, and subsequently tie-up valuable tax dollars that could be spent reducing fees for those taking more academically rigorous courses.

Similarly, it's not the place of publicly funded institutions to fund ideologically biased subjects like Feminist studies. If you're going to fund Feminist studies, then why not potential subjects with a right-wing bias like libertarian studies or ethno-nationalist studies. Once you open the door to this kind of post-modern market populism then where do you draw the line?

Furthermore, the market populist principle of funding institutions according to student demand, means that universities have to plough for trade and waste precious tax money on advertising, instead of restricting access and attracting students through lower fees.

Market populism and egalitarianism may have been noble or progressive ideas in the minds of Baby Boomers, but for today's students, they're leading to a future of debt and disillusionment.