David Farrar: Free fees is very badly spent money

Susan Edmonds writes at Radio NZ:

Eligible students can now apply for funds to help with the cost of their final year of study.

But one economist is asking whether it’s the best use of the money.

David Farrar: Here’s some wasteful spending the Government could redirect

The Herald reports:

The Government’s fees-free policy reset is at risk of following its predecessor in failing to incentivise tertiary study and only benefiting the more advantaged.

The warning is included in a Ministry of Education-led analysis, which found the “deadweight” policy to be so poor that it recommended axing it and spending the money elsewhere.

Collin Bjork: Why universities must be wary of embracing AI-driven teaching tools....

Clones in the classroom - why universities must be wary of embracing AI-driven teaching tools

The university sector in New Zealand is at a tipping point due to chronic underfunding, shifting enrolments and increasing costs from inflation. In response, the government has established two working groups to assess the health of the sector and provide recommendations for the future.

Dr Michael Johnston: Will artificial intelligence enhance or undermine human intelligence?

It is about 18 months since the release of Chat-GPT, the first widely available ‘large-language’ artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. Even in that time, the capabilities of AI have massively improved. There is every reason to expect the improvement to continue, in unpredictable ways.

Michael Johnston: Bullsh*t detectors are the answer

Many students … intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance … to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.

So opens Deschooling Society, a provocative 1971 book on education by Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich.

Illich’s analysis of the confusion of “process and substance” was insightful. Fifty years on, it can help us understand the rot that has set into New Zealand’s education system.

A third of our young people emerge from school barely able to read. Could that be because we confuse teaching – or, at least, the appearance thereof – with learning?

Point of Order: Free-thinking Chloe has gone out to bat for impoverished students

Chloe Swarbrick is one of the most interesting politicians in the New Zealand Parliament, a highly effective campaigner who – after one term as a List MP – won Auckland Central for the Green Party.

Still only 28, she is already seen as a future leader of her party.

This week she took up the cudgels on behalf of students and gave the government a hammering.