This afternoon, the Minister for Tertiary Education came out saying that the “individual student lot continues to improve.” Good one Pete.
Mr. Hodgson claims that Labour has been the shining light for students, and when it rode into power in 1999 things started to get better, and Labour did this by:
– abolishing interest on all student loans to stop debts escalating.
– capping tuition fees.
– increasing the parental income threshold for allowances so that over half of eligible students now receive a non-repayable allowance.
Sorry to be the one to point this out Mr. Hodgson, you did not cap tuition fees, for the past three years I have been at Victoria my fees have gone up almost 5% per year, which is more than the rate of inflation, and definitely more than the amount living costs have gone up in the ten years Labour has been in power.
Also removing the interest has probably helped students, after they’ve stopped studying. It does not help me, in my fourth year of university, doing my honours year, right now. Because my parents earn slightly too much for me to qualify for the Student Allowance (even after you increased the threshold), I am shit out of luck. I rely on the Foodbank run by VUWSA, and have dipped into over-draught (which co-incidentally is also interest free till I stop being a student and then the interest skyrockets to over 15%), and some of my friends have had to take personal loans to cover the bare necessities of living whilst being a student.
Increasing the parental income threshold has not helped me at all, it does however help the people whose parents earn just a bit more than mine, and who can afford trusts and who own businesses, to slyly stash it away. I have a friend whose parents own a business, she gets weekly pay cheques of just under the allowable limit, they gave her a laptop, paid in part for her rent, etc etc, but she somehow was still eligible for the full amount of the allowance. Most of us have a friend like that.
Even though student allowances have gone up $5, rents in Wellington have risen about 10%, leaving a lot of students with negative dollars to spend. Studylink is a bitch too, this weeks letter to the editor really takes the cake for SL’s buffoonery.
Pete, resorting to a “Things were much worse back in the day” argument to counter student debt reaching $10 billion dollars does nothing. It does nothing to help us students put food on the table, pay rent or heat ourselves when winter starts to set in.
What you need to do, and what would endear students to Labour, would be to listen to the Greens, you did it on the minimum wage, so why not here?
Abolishing interest on student debt is not going to make us pay it back. There need to be incentives to do so.
If you’re going to cap tuition fees, you should put in a clause saying they can rise 5% each year, and in some cases more if the university feels cheeky enough to challenge the maxima scheme.
Provide a universal student allowance, or at least widen the limits so that even more students can take advantage of it.
The reason why students do not come to your electorate office is that they cannot afford the time too. Having to study, attend classes, work almost fulltime, and chase up Studylink does not leave us much time to come crying to you.