Mike's Minute: Fees Free was a mistake - let's not repeat it

I have learned a lot about kids and university, having had two attend and graduate and one still immersed in the experience.  Here are the takeouts.  Generally, you go for a reason. You have an idea of what you want to achieve and those who don’t, flounder quickly.  I have many examples of kids who enrolled because "that is what you do".  Schools too often give university as a default. It has a snobbery about it as if successful people only go on to tertiary learning.  It seems the wider lesson we have all learned is Jacinda Ardern's "next year is on me" was fatally flawed because funding the first year was literally a waste of money and even when it got put to the back end of study, it would seem the world hasn’t been changed.  So they are scrapping it.  The reality is people on a path will incur debt in the belief that whatever it is they are studying will serve them well, provide challenge and enjoyment, and hopefully pay a wage that allows them to pay back the loan and get on with their lives.  University has always been heavily subsidised anyway on the idea that we all benefit. But to suggest you study for anyone other than your own personal satisfaction and enhancement is farcical.  So no more first year/last year artificiality.  The money will be put elsewhere, perhaps into the more practical side of the workforce. Personally, I wouldn’t mind it being saved. It's not like we actually have the money in the first place anyway.  But the Winston Peters argument appears to be the trades, which makes it yet another of those debates that is constantly tinkered with and never really resolved.  Is paying an employer to train a person any more or less wasteful, or artificial, than paying a university to train a doctor?  We need doctors as much if not more than we need plumbers. Both are valuable, both are in short supply.  The Peters argument will of course be driven by the immigration aspect of it all.  If we don’t train who we need, we bring them in and before you know it you have a "butter chicken tsunami".  It's of course a government again picking winners and I would have thought we had already learned that lesson.  Peters’ other idea, if you remember back, was bonding students to regions, or indeed immigrants to regions. That didn’t work either.  The trick here is not to repeat past mistakes. And yet the budget is destined to include at least one. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.