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June 25, 2003
user pays?
This cuts the ground from under the feet of the right to an education advocates. Tim Watts says:
"Australian taxpayers subsidised more than 70 per cent of the cost of my tertiary education.Even though I'm now out earning more than $60,000 a year, I will never pay back a cent of the cost of my tertiary education. My HECS fees were paid upfront and so I got a substantial additional discount from the Government... feel taxpayers basically paid me to get an elite education that is not universally available."
Middle class welfare is an acccurate description. So if you shift to a greater private contribution for degrees that lead to wealth creation, then how do you ensure greater access and equity for those who do not have the money to buy their degrees up front?
Loan schemes? Scholarships?
What we have is more in the way of ongoing economic reform that has been going since the 1980s. This economic reform that has been experienced as the dull compulsion of the market that reduces our quality of life. The economy booms, GDP is up, the corporations make more money and the wealthy are doing fine. Many, however, have suffered and they are angry.
That quarter century of economic reform, which put the market before social needs, is creating a different kind of world to the one we once knew. It is one where we are less dependent on governments and states, and more dependent on markets, prices and money. Consequently, we worry more, are more stressed and are more anxious about jobs and employment, even as work cuts ever more deeply into the texture of daily lives.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 25, 2003 09:31 AM
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