It appears that the days of open entry to university and tertiary study in New Zealand are numbered.

The National Government's willingness to clamp down on student numbers, restrict student loan usage and fund tertiary institutions on the basis of academic results are all harbingers of this. New Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce is signalling the changes in an attempt to restrain spending on the tertiary sector as part of the Government's overall desire to control public spending.

What I would applaud is the government's desire to review the number of New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) registered qualifications. Many of them tend to be either certificate or diploma level qualifications delivered by for-profit providers. In saying this, I would seek to remind National that it was their desire to introduce a free market tertiary education system (a process begun by the Fourth Labour Government in 1990) that generated all these superflous qualifications. In fact, I did one (a Certificate in Media Communications) in the early part of last decade at a satellite campus of a well known South Island polytechnic. While it gave me the ability to become a freelance writer for a time, it has not served me well in the longer term. Overall, the setting up of numerous degree factories where graduands don't get jobs in the areas they trained in has been a major negative outcome of the user pays system.

It might also be argued that funding tertiary institutions on the basis of academic results does have merit. However, this might generate another problem in that tertiary institutions might be forced to cut corners and pass students who might otherwise fail. This might enable them to look good in order to attract funding. This was said to be an issue under the current equivalent full time student (EFTS) funding model. Hence, I don't see what difference the new policy will make to the issue of undergraduate failure. Already, many tertiary institutions do have policies in place where students who consistently fail more than half their course are disqualified from enrolment after two or three years anyway. Therefore, it just isn't true that students who consistently fail have some sort of ongoing ability to be continuously supported by the taxpayer in their studies.

Besides, the growth in tertiary enrolments (particularly over the last two years) have been spurred on by the recession. I am one of those people who have opted to escape the harshness of the recession by undertaking tertiary study. As an MA student, I am in fact upskilling myself having been awarded BA and Dip Arts degrees by the University of Otago during the 1990s. After being made redundant from my previous job in 2008, I considered going back to university to be the best option. Many thousands of other New Zealanders are doing the same and while many might be first time university or tertiary sector entrants, why should they be penalised in making an attempt to upskill themselves for when the upturn arrives? Furthermore, if you're thinking that some people might be best suited to undertake an apprenticeship rather than university or polytech study, then I would agree with you, at least up to a point. Where the problem lies at the moment though is in the ability of employers and government to offer apprenticeships which have fallen off due to the recession.

What needs to happen is that the user pays tertiary education regime should go. As part of an education policy which sees all forms of user pays disappear from the state education system altogether, tertiary education (as with all schools) should be made fees free. Already the Southland Institute of Technology (SIT) offers free tertiary courses and this has been a boon to the city of Invercargill. So why not introduce it throughout New Zealand? In tandem with this, student loans should be abolished and all debt written off (and the writing off of debt is relatively simple - after all, in the 1980s, the then Labour Government wrote off New Zealand Steel's debt). We should also pay decent, non-means tested student allowances to all students. Unsurprisingly, I have to confess that this is Alliance Party policy (which is the party that I belong to). Personally, it is one of the reasons as to why I'm in the Alliance and on the left of politics in that I believe that education should be a universally free service from kindergarten through to university and polytech.

That's why I believe in the ideal that not only should tertiary education serve an immediate purpose in making people economically independent but also enable them to develop the critical thinking skills that are essential to the maintenance of a democratic society. An end to open entry would deny those opportunities to many thousands of New Zealanders and this would be a great tragedy for us all.