Tuesday, May 16, 2017



Starving students

The latest indecency due to tertiary education cuts: students are starving":

Tertiary students are "regularly going without food or other necessities" because they cannot afford them, according to a survey.

It found of the almost 2000 students at Unitec in Auckland, 17 percent are going hungry as they struggle to pay the bills.

More than half of all students and two thirds of Māori students said at some stage in the last year their income was not enough to cover their living costs.


The core problem here is that student allowances are unavailable, and student loan living cost components (under which students can borrow in order to simply eat: a perfect example of the student loan scheme's system of odious debt) are insufficient. Meanwhile, full-time study - something the government has encouraged by penalising part-timers - makes it difficult to hold down a part-time job. The net result is that students without rich parents in Remuera are struggling. Some will be failing because of that struggle - which is a huge waste of talent.

But hey, taxes on those rich parents in Remuera are low, right? And that's all National apparently cares about.