Post‐school horizons: New Zealand’s neo‐liberal generation in transition

Abstract

Dominant conceptions of the world infuse educational experiences for young people in implicit rather than explicit ways—through becoming, as Stuart Hall argues, ‘the horizon of the taken‐for‐granted’. In this article we explore these horizons as experienced by New Zealand’s neo‐liberal generation, currently ‘in transition’ from high school to further education, training and/or employment. As in Britain, further education has become a taken‐for‐granted feature of post‐school horizons for young New Zealanders but it is not a meaningful destination for all of them. The 93 young New Zealanders in our study have grown up during a period of intensive neo‐liberal reform, the speed and scope of which were unprecedented in Western economies. We interviewed these young people in their last year of high school and again once they were well embarked on their post‐school lives. We explore how the landscapes of choice of these young people have been restructured in neo‐liberal times: for some, the influences of parents, teachers, schools, universities and educational policy have come together to construct apparently wide‐open horizons in which university is a taken‐for‐granted destination. For others, however, these influences have remained subject to assumptions about ‘race’ and class that have a long history in New Zealand and the result has been a narrowing of future possibilities for participants. In all cases, we are concerned to explore the costs that are borne by these young people in this new environment.

Notes

1. Access to any New Zealand university is initially by high school qualification for school leavers, but all New Zealanders are eligible to attend any university once they reach 20 years of age, regardless of school qualifications.

2. Pākehā are New Zealanders of British and European descent.

3. In 1981 6% of men in the NZ population and 2.8% of women had a university qualification. Polytechnic qualifications were held by 17% of men and 14% of women (Horsfeld, 1988).

4. wānanga are tertiary institutions conceptualised by Māori for Māori. Non‐Māori are welcome but on Māori terms.

5. The New Zealand Ministry of Education (2003) Report noted the highest rate of tertiary participation in New Zealand’s history: 13% of the population aged 15 and over were enrolled in formal tertiary education during 2003. The report also noted that Māori had the highest participation rate of any ethnic group: more than 20% of Māori aged 15 and over were participating in tertiary education.

6. Brown and Hesketh (2004, p. 146) explain positional advantage as the exploitation of all the resources an individual and/or family can assemble, including ‘buying a better education’, to gain advantage in the labour market. We think the term is also usefully applied to schools that exploit all their resources to gain positional advantage in the education market in order to occupy the top positions in the hierarchy of school reputations (also see Lauder et al., 1999).

7. All names are code names. In naming our participants’ ethnicities we have used their self‐identifiers as much as possible but we are mindful of ‘fixing’ identities in this way and of how this sits in tension with our earlier use of the umbrella term ‘Pacific Island’. We are also aware that naming Pacific Island identities should (but does not) differentiate between those who are ‘Island born’ and ‘New Zealand born’ as this is also an important marker of Pacific Island identities (Suaalii‐Sauni, 2005). In order to keep the descriptors of each participant manageable in terms of length, the reader can assume that Pacific Island participants are New Zealand born unless noted otherwise.

8. Cathy’s mother is a professional and her father works in a service occupation, therefore we ‘class’ her family circumstances as a mixture of working‐ and middle‐class while noting that there is more than occupation to take account of when ‘classifying’ people (Bourdieu, 1984).

9. Rita (Māori) the daughter of a mother with a university degree who is currently unemployed was alone in this group in not having university plans. Instead she has enrolled in a catering course: ‘[my] family forced me to decide something and they just enrolled me. See if I get the scholarship’. Although it is speculative, we wonder if Rita’s mother’s unemployment in spite of holding a university degree prompted her to advise her daughter to consider an alternative post‐school path.