Wairarapa Times-Age WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 23, 1942. ASSISTANCE FOR STUDENTS.
it stands, the decision of the Government to institute a J " system ol: medical and dental bursaries designed to assist in removing the financial barrier to study Jias a great deal to commend it. A student granted a bursary is to be paid £7O a year, plus a boarding allowance of £4O if he is living away from liome. These payments, the Minister of Health (Mr Nordmeyer) has explained, are not intended to cover the whole cost of a medical or dental course, but they are considered sufficient in enable any student, however poor his home circumstances, to become a dentist or a doctor if he cares to supplement the bursary by working during his vacations.
It is evidently desirable from a national standpoint, as well as from that of individuals, that the financial barrier to study for the medical, and dental professions, and indeed for other professions as well, should be removed, hi existing conditions some students well endowed with ability arc prevented from entering on extended courses of study because they and their parents are too poor to meet the costs involved. It happens fairly often, too, that very great and burdensome sacrifices are made by parents of limited means in order that their sons or daughters may take up courses of professional study.
Apart from any question of consideration for individuals, this state of affairs evidently must be amended if the community is to make the most of its assets of brainpower. In these days of mounting problems of many kinds, it should be easy to agree that the waste of natural, ability is an act of improvidence of which we cannot afford to be guilty.
Within the limits to which they extend, the medical and dental bursaries now to be instituted should serve an excellent purpose, but the whole question of removing financial barriers to advanced professional or other studies is worth examining from the.broadest standpoint. In ideal, conditions no able and earnest student would be prevented by lack of means from pursuing his or her studies and it is evidently only in these conditions, in this country or any other, that the powers latent in youth can be developed to the full.
It is, of course, true that apart from the latest addition of medical, and dental bursaries, a great deal is done in. this country, in one way and another, to assist students of limited means. The financial barrier to study is very far, however, from having been removed completely. The removal of all that remains of this barrier need not of necessity imply a wholesale multiplication of bursaries or other grants in aid. There is, for example, the alternative of so arranging and adjusting university courses of all kinds that students would be given every reasonable opportunity of working their passage, as it were, towards their educational goals.
In practice this might mean shortening to half the year the period covered by university terms and perhaps adding a year or two to the duration of courses. With about one-hall' of each year available for industrial or other employment it should be quite possible for students reasonably endowed with ability and energy to establish themselves on a self-supporting basis. This is not a matter of theory. The division of the year into periods devoted respectively to academic studies and to gainful occupation has been tried out extensively in the United States and elsewhere and has yielded excellent' results. There can be no better way of assisting either gifted and ambitious students, or .students of merely respectable ability, than by establishing the conditions in which they will best be able to help themselves.
Precisely how university organisation broadly on these lines might most advantageously be developed in New Zealand is a matter for detailed consideration, but that consideration is in every way warranted. There should be no great difficulty in devising conditions in which students would be enabled, by selfreliant effort, to surmount all financial barriers to progress through the walks of higher education.
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Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 December 1942, Page 2
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678Wairarapa Times-Age WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 23, 1942. ASSISTANCE FOR STUDENTS. Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 December 1942, Page 2
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