Education essential for social mobility

While ultimately education needs to be pursued for its own sake, that motive may be more easily endorsed from a position of achievement rather than one of aspiration.

It is properly a requirement as a continuing effort for the experienced professional but more difficult for the aspiring young person, whose practical needs may be more pressing.

At the same time as recognising reality, I've always been a little squeamish about all those arguments that posit how much more money will be earned with a tertiary degree. But then, hindsight is 20/20 and from the lofty little perch on which I sit it's much easier to extol the virtues of education as an end in itself. It wasn't always so.

Among the many reasons for my gratitude to the US is the opportunity it afforded this poor boy from an immigrant family to aspire to an elite education and eventually to a professional life. This despite my origins in a blue-collar neighbourhood with schools that would be easily described here as low decile.

But that was truly in another time, in which the great engine of economic advancement was being churned by many others just like me. We could take advantage of the meritocracy created by academic and governmental policy that together made possible the underwriting through scholarships, grants and occasional loans, the pursuit of our educational goals. And if we "succeeded", we could repay the investment not only in social goods but in the harder currency of taxes on our incomes.

Today in the US that kind of ascension is all but impossible. The public policy doesn't exist. And elite universities are priced way out of the market, charging annually the equivalent of the median earnings of a family of four. One serious side effect is the decrease in social mobility. Several studies quoted in The National Review, a conservative magazine, argue that the US now lags behind most of Western Europe, Scandinavia, Canada and Australia in terms of social mobility.

Social and economic mobility once easily distinguished the US from, say, Europe or Asia. That was the essence of the American Dream, the dream of infinite opportunity, which is slowly fading into history.

Failure to invest in educational opportunity for all citizens is, in a rapidly changing global economy, a recipe for stagnation. Unfortunately, the National Party, obsessed with cutting services and increasing joblessness in response to a self-generated deficit whose proportions remain picayune in comparative terms, is bent on repeating America's failures as a sleight of hand to disguise its slow dismantling of the social safety nets. Don't get me wrong. I'm for collecting the outstanding student debt, though not in the repo-man manner that Bill English would go about it. Frankly, I wish he'd shown that zeal in oversight that might have prevented the Canterbury Finance fiasco.

In the face of increasing classroom size for economic reasons, it is startling to learn of the disproportionate support this Government is giving to a private school that caters to the children of the well-to-do as compared with the other schools. I value the work of the Collegiate School. And it's great that it's located here. But surely its economic troubles can be more easily assuaged through more systematic appeals to its very distinguished alumni than by the need to turn to the taxpayer for $3 million.

I'm not against Collegiate. We need Collegiate. It sets a standard for excellence. Such a school provides a benefit to the entire community but not exactly the educational opportunity for the sons and daughters of the not-so-well-off to achieve the dreams of their own creation. Unless the Collegiate School recognises an obligation to have its brightest students serve regularly as mentors to those students in less advantaged schools.