By DITA DE BONI
If you want to know why advocates of a knowledge economy despair of our education system, take a look at these figures.
Each year, about 100,000 tertiary students - a third of New Zealand's total - take some form of law, commerce or business degree.
Although many will head overseas when they graduate, they are still far too many for New Zealand's compact business sector to absorb.
Figures for more than 25,000 graduates in 2000 show that 26.7 per cent received commerce and business degrees and almost 30 per cent studied social and behavioural sciences.
Despite a national shortage of trained scientists, only 6.7 per cent completed biological sciences courses, 6.8 per cent maths and 2.2 per cent physical sciences.
But if an ambitious Government plan works, these figures will change.
Last week, Tertiary Education Minister Steve Maharey laid out a strategy for an all-encompassing, Government-controlled tertiary sector unlike anything the country has seen.
The changes will be enacted by the Tertiary Education Reform Bill, which is expected to be passed this week, and in Thursday's Budget Finance Minister Michael Cullen will reveal where the money goes.
Some tertiary courses can expect bigger state subsidies. Others face less money or limits on student numbers.
From 2004, the ramifications will be felt by more than 300,000 tertiary students.
The plan is to churn out the right kind and number of graduates to feed the knowledge economy.
So if you or your child wants to become an accountant or lawyer in 2005, it may not be as easy to do a BCom or LLB.
A funding cap will restrict enrolments by number and area.
If your heart is set on a law degree and you don't make the tightly controlled number for your region, you may have to move cities or pay a lot extra. Or you could try something like biotechnology, which is more valuable to the Government and therefore likely to be heavily subsidised.
Although most people in the sector are happy that finally there is a plan to work to, there is huge disagreement about the model.
The country's university vice-chancellors, polytechnic heads, students and staff as well as interested lobby groups such as the Business Roundtable are horrified at the amount of power that will be vested in the Minister of Education.
And although Maharey stresses that a broad-based education system is still an important requirement, student leaders wonder what might happen to subjects such as classics and art history, which probably contribute little to boosting exports of New Zealand butter to Malaysia.
"Students want a strategy that supports an ... education system based around quality and access, not business needs," says University Students Association head Andrew Campbell.
"The overwhelming focus of this strategy is to align tertiary education provision with economic goals. As a result, courses that fall outside of this alignment appear under threat."
Economically unviable subjects may not be the only losers. Polytechnics could lose funding for their degree courses if the commission decides they are surplus to requirements, and private tertiary providers that receive funding for courses that compete with public institutions may also find themselves constrained.
Currently, almost anyone can offer a course to tertiary students so long as it meets New Zealand Qualifications Authority criteria.
For each equivalent full-time student, the provider receives a certain amount of Government funding - less in private institutions, more in public institutions such as polytechnics and universities.
This method has encouraged competition between providers, including the country's eight universities, and in some cases has led to duplication of courses.
It has also caused an explosion in the number of private tertiary providers, which last year outnumbered public institutions by 418.
Some of these institutions have plugged gaps in the system - mostly left by polytechnics and other institutions looking to move away from purely practical courses, but others have caused concerns about quality of education.
Nevertheless, a burgeoning private tertiary sector has succeeded in pulling more students into higher education, which is what architects of the free market model envisaged in 1989.
The Learning for Life reforms, introduced in the Education Act of that year, encouraged private operators and gave bulk grants to public institutions.
During the 1990s, tertiary enrolments across all providers increased by about 30 per cent. Maori participation grew by 103 per cent and Pacific Islander participation by just under 120 per cent, mostly in the private tertiary sector.
As Government advisers wrote early last year, "it is clear the changes to the tertiary education system in the past decade have brought significant benefits, including wider opportunities for participation and a more flexible patten of delivery".
But the problems were also surfacing.
The Association of University Staff summed up the changes as an "unplanned and ad hoc expansion of tertiary education provision that has proved both wasteful and unnecessary for a country with a small population and limited resources".
It criticised "a narrowing of the range of available programmes, the loss of essential polytechnic trades programmes, a duplication of ... programmes, a decline in the quality of provision".
The Tertiary Education Advisory Committee, set up in April 2000, was charged with solving these problems.
Its recommendations made up four reports to the Government, which have formed the basis of the Tertiary Education Reform Bill and its ideological guiding document, the Tertiary Education Strategy, which was issued last week.
Both require all institutions expecting public funding to supply a detailed charter and an institutional profile to the new commission. The extra work involved in this alone has been greeted with dismay.
Jack MacDonald, who heads South Auckland's Manukau Institute of Technology, says the tertiary sector is sick of constantly changing direction.
"The implication is that by quenching competition, enhancing co-operation, creating charters and profiles, changing the funding formula, creating TEC, and steering us with Government-knows-best direction, all will be well.
"All will not be well. First of all, change is disruptive, expensive and difficult to manage. We in New Zealand change educational policy with every new minister and every new Government. There is much to be said for a relatively stable framework and environment."
MacDonald, who agrees with the Government's aims, urges it to use persuasion rather than enforcement and financial incentives rather than wholesale changes to the funding system.
He adds: "It would be marvellous if the current Government could try very hard to get the support of the Opposition so that all does not change once again on change of Government."
University vice-chancellors, along with the Business Roundtable, are opposed to the lack of autonomy under the new system. They say the inflexibility of a centralised approach will not assist New Zealand to become a knowledge economy.
"While central steering might look persuasive on paper, it generally fails in practice," says Roundtable policy adviser Norman LaRocque.
"It is likely to result in more red tape for institutions, less choice for students, more scope for arbitrary funding decisions and greater micro-management of the sector."
A concern for the vice-chancellors is a possible lack of academic freedom, which they maintain the new Bill will enforce.
The Tertiary Education Commission, which is answerable directly to the Minister of Education, will ultimately decide how much money an institution gets. This will be done on the basis of acceptance or rejection of each institution's charter and profile, which must be submitted and "negotiated" with the Commission.
The new monitoring and invention regime is viewed by the vice-chancellors as a direct threat to institutional autonomy.
But others argue that some universities and polytechnics have not made a great case for unlimited independence in the past few years. As an example, they point to Christchurch Polytechnic setting up campuses in Auckland and Timaru.
Jim Doyle, head of the Association of Polytechnics, says the Government's aims are clear enough.
He agrees with the aim of a collaborative approach, which should remove destructive competition and unnecessary duplication, but worries about the elaborate process.
"It seems to us that the whole business is being grossly overcooked. There is no reason why we could not have been getting on with the process using basically the same structures and basically the same funding system.
"All that is needed is to apply appropriate incentives to make things happen.
"Instead, we have a whole new industry being built up that is almost certainly not necessary."
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