Every year, the New Zealand Government writes off hundreds of millions of dollars from the value of the loans it provides to tertiary student borrowers. It has been doing this for a decade now. Ten years on, it looks like the scheme has done nothing to improve access to tertiary education, to reduce student debt, to reduce debt repayment times, or to discourage Kiwi students from heading abroad. Instead, students leave university with more debt that they take longer to pay off, more overseas based borrowers have outstanding debt, and tertiary enrolment rates have dropped.
What are we doing?
Last week, The New Zealand Initiative released its report on our Decade of Debt. We there argue that the government should reinstate interest on new lending, from 2018. The savings should be put toward measures that improve real tertiary accessibility, like better tertiary preparation at secondary schools with little history of…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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