The Business Of Learning: It is hard to imagine a structure more beset with perverse incentives for unethical behaviour than New Zealand’s tertiary education system. The wonder is not that instances of corruption are being exposed, but that it has taken so long for them to come to light.
ASSIGNMENTS FOR YOU – yes, you – the struggling overseas
student with poor English. For just $270 you can have a respectable B-Grade.
Straight-As are a little more expensive.
Many New Zealanders were shocked to learn that for at least
five years professional “tutors” have been ghost-writing essays and assignments
for Chinese tertiary students.
They should not have been.
It is hard to imagine a structure more beset with perverse
incentives for unethical behaviour than New Zealand’s tertiary education system.
The wonder is not that instances of corruption are being exposed, but that it
has taken so long for them to come to light.
Driving this corruption, as always, is the inadequate
funding of public institutions.
Reputable tertiary education systems do not come cheap. Lacking
the numbers of extremely wealthy individuals, families and corporations that
make possible the privately endowed universities of the United Kingdom and the
United States, New Zealand’s institutions of higher learning are the product of
massive amounts of public investment over many decades – most particularly the
1960s and 70s.
What Kiwis relied upon, in lieu of private wealth, was a
social bargain that saw the nation’s most talented children provided with what
was, in effect, a large educational subsidy while engaged in acquiring the
knowledge and skills so essential to building a sophisticated modern economy.
That subsidy – what we used to call “free education” – was
society’s half of the bargain. The tertiary educated citizen’s half was collected
over the course of his or her working life by means of a sharply progressive
income tax. Citizens with tertiary qualifications generally attracted the highest
salaries, and, as their incomes rose, so, too, did their fiscal contribution to
the state.
By the end of the university degree-holders’ working lives,
they and the state were pretty much square. The truck-driver from Linwood may
have helped to pay for the Fendalton lawyer’s son to go to varsity, but, over
the course of his working life, the Fendalton lawyer’s son paid him back.
What’s more, if the Linwood truck-driver’s daughter was bright, she could go to
varsity for free – and even receive a bursary – courtesy of the Fendalton
lawyer.
But this highly successful and socially equitable solution
to the problem of providing young New Zealanders with expensive tertiary
qualifications came to an abrupt halt in the 1980s. Rogernomics put an end to
our steeply progressive income tax and with it the social-democratic tertiary
education system it had funded. The universities and polytechnics were forced
to look elsewhere for money.
Enter the wealthy overseas student in search of a reputable
degree or diploma from an advanced, English-speaking, tertiary institution. Overnight,
the full-fees paid by tens-of-thousands of foreign students would become an
indispensable component of university and polytechnic budgets. Every university
vice-chancellor was concerned to make his university as overseas-student-friendly
as possible. Every registrar felt obliged to enrol as many of these overseas
student cash-cows as could be squeezed into the institution’s by now
overcrowded lecture theatres.
The best way to do this was to ensure that the overseas
student received value for money. Having invested thousands of dollars in the
process, the student (and his family) were unlikely to accept failing grades
with equanimity. Even the suggestion that a university was flunking too many
overseas students could prove fatal to its finances.
Tertiary institutions are filled with very intelligent
people, so vice-chancellors didn’t need to send out a memo detailing the requirements
of the new regime. The professors, lecturers and tutors had already grasped
what was expected of them.
They knew that the well-researched, correctly referenced and
clearly written essays handed in by overseas students who struggled to
construct a coherent English sentence in tutorials, were almost certainly not their
own work, but they marked them anyway. Because they also knew that assessing an
overseas student’s work according to the standards applied to New Zealand-born
students would be a colossal, career-terminating, error of judgement.
The corrosive effects of such hypocrisy are all-too-readily
predictable. Leaving aside the malignant impact on the moral health of
university staff, these false assessments cannot help raising the expectations
of New Zealand-born students. Surely, as paying customers, they also deserve
value for their fees? How long will it be before tertiary educators feel
obliged to dole out passing grades to every single one of their student
“customers”?
In the old Soviet Union, the hard-pressed workers were fond
of saying: “So long as they pretend to pay us, we’ll pretend to work.” The joke
brilliantly encapsulated the dishonesty that had corrupted the entire Soviet
system.
Our once proud tertiary education system now stands in peril
of embodying a similar level of systemic pretence. Indeed, its academic workers
may already be muttering to one another: “So long as they pretend this place is
a university, we’ll pretend its students have earned their degrees.”
This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
14 May 2013.
