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During the postwar boom New Zealand had 'free' tertiary education. I was an undergraduate student a while after the boom ended, but my fees at Canterbury University as a full-time student were $NZ40 a year (that's less than 60 US dollars) and it was possible to earn that with just a week's pay in the factory job I had in the holidays between school and university. In the late 1980s, the fourth Labour government began introducing 'user pays' as part of its right-wing economic reforms. Student fees began to rise massively and education has been commodified quite a bit since then - although students today still only pay about 30% of what it costs to have them at university. While NZ is a specific case of the commodification of tertiary education, the trend is global, so folks might be interested in this: Commodifying education: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/1238/ Looking at what has happened in universities, it seems to me that the process of turning universities into technocratic institutions, which was a feature of the 1960s, got halted by revolts by students (and, to some extent, staff). But the right-wing economic reforms across most of the First World in the 1980s kick-started the process again. This time round it has met with much less resistance, so has continually eroded the old bourgeois-liberal notion of a liberal university education. Phil _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
