Free fees are gone – but the bigger story is the crisis in tertiary education

The free fees scheme for tertiary students never went far enough, and its demise highlights chronic issues of underfunding for universities and polytechs, says Tertiary Education Union president.

The coalition Government’s decision to scrap the fees-free tertiary education scheme has ignited debate about student debt, access to university, and the wider crisis facing New Zealand’s tertiary sector.

In a new interview with Public Interest, Tertiary Education Union president Ti Lamusse says the move will leave students with thousands of dollars of extra debt, and it exposes deeper problems facing universities and polytechnics after years of underfunding.

“We have seen job cuts, course cuts, campuses shut down,” Lamusse says, arguing the sector is now “in crisis”.

A flagship policy of Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Government, the scheme was initially supposed to extend in time to offer three free years of tertiary study. 

But that extension never happened, and on Saturday the finance minister Nicola Willis confirmed the scheme will be scrapped entirely in the upcoming budget. 

The Government has justified the change by arguing the scheme failed to significantly lift tertiary participation, particularly among lower-income students. 

But Lamusse says one free year was never enough to overcome the broader barriers facing students. “You can’t expect a scheme like this to succeed when it only applied for one year,” he says.

Lamusse is now calling for student loan debt to be cancelled and for greater investment in the tertiary sector overall, alongside the reintroduction of the free-fees scheme.

“If we actually took a very hard look at the tax being paid by the wealthy, we would find that we do have the resources as a society to ensure that anyone who wants to and is able to can get a high quality tertiary education either in our polytechs or our wānanga or our universities,” he says.

Watch the full interview below.