I’m going to make this exceptionally clear: you are not poor because you’ve made poor life choices. You are poor because there’s a student poverty crisis.
It’s not like you enjoy it, right? Do you enjoy being in one of the most impoverished communities in Aotearoa? Do you enjoy the fact that two thirds of us choose between buying fresh veg and paying rent? Does that seem even remotely fair to you?
Education has not always cost money. 86% of students used to get free money from the government. In the last 50 years, education has been commodified, turned from a public good into a private privilege. And sure, there are pathways designed and implemented in order to help poorer students get the same opportunities as richer ones, but tell me what’s easier, tell me what’s going to cause fewer problems: designing a multitude of policies and safety nets to secure the education of various marginalised communities one at a time, or just not charging so much for education in the first place?
Notice I said “so much” – the proper amount is “zero”. Education itself is an investment; it is the surest pathway to a more prosperous society, to a populace more resilient to digitally-peddled disinformation, to a community of people that are better equipped to take care of one another. And yes, it requires investment by the State, but so does everything. That is quite literally their job. So long as students remain impoverished, the prospect of becoming a student becomes less and less attractive to more and more people, and the reality of being a student becomes more and more humiliating. Looking back at Critic from 2004, where this title image came from, you can tell that very little has changed: “We live like dogs”, they said. The $150 a week was not enough to pay for food and rent, they said – even though rent was only $65/week. Compare that to today’s numbers, and you ought to feel justified in your disgust. Student loan sums have stagnated, while the cost of everything else has skyrocketed.
I don’t know how to get this across more clearly: you do not have to be this poor. It is not your fault because you aren’t “working hard enough”; many of us have side jobs. It is not your fault for spending “so much money” on booze; your parents drank plenty without breaking the bank (and besides, rampant student alcoholism should be treated as a health problem, not a financial one). It is not your fault that you “didn’t save up enough”; summer job wages are pitiful, and the cost of rent, petrol and food are (as I’m sure some politicians wish they could say) absolutely fucking ridiculous. It is not your fault that you are this poor, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Being flat broke isn’t just “part of the Uni experience”. It’s a reality that has been created and left unchecked by our government: a group of people who all benefited from less expensive tertiary education. As long as Uni remains something that someone can squeeze out a dollar from, the screws will continue to tighten until something finally breaks: either us, or the status quo. And it's not gonna be us.