Another tertiary scam

At the same time as Labour is trying to destroy most private education providers (which I will detail separately), it is still allowing publicly owned polytechnics to rort the system.

The Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology has had $5 million of funding for what appears to be a Cool IT type scam. The course has

* no tuition
* no assessment
* no qualification

This is just incompetence of the highest level that years after these scams were exposed, Labour is allowing them to continue. The issue isn’t whether they are approved by the Tertiary Education Commission. The issue is that the policies as set by the Minister allow this to happen.

As I have said many times one could halt all these scams within days by merely requiring a minimal fee to be charged for courses. That is why the market is not working – because students can sign up for free, so they don’t evaluate the merits of the course.

Bill English points out that the Polytechnic doesn’t even have half as many computers as it would need to run the course if everyone they got funding for turned up.

Whenever Labour goes on about how there is no money for tax cuts, remember the hundreds and hundreds of millions they have wasted on some of these scams. Now it’s no disgrace to find that people are starting to rort a system and you need to change the system. But it is an absolute disgrace that years and years later they are still doing it!