There's no doubt that as a nation there is a need for some collective belt-tightening: the costs of the Christchurch rebuild, low dairy prices and so on mean that the Government has little choice but to cut expenditure where it can.
So it's not surprising that the Government is exploring ways to limit growth to the $12.8 billion that was spent on education during the 2014/15 financial year.
Capping the New Zealand student loan scheme to seven years for undergraduate study is a decision that would appear at first to protect the interests of New Zealand taxpayers in minimising the risk that the scheme might be supporting those who take an extraordinary amount of time to complete a degree.
It could also be argued that seven years provides sufficient opportunity for students to complete a first degree and this policy therefore strikes a reasonable balance between the interests of students and taxpayers.
While we acknowledge that the seven-year cap makes sense for many degree programmes, there are, however, serious implications for longer vocational degrees such as dentistry and medicine.
The most common and shortest course of study for a medical degree takes six years, so the majority of students will not be directly impacted by the seven-year cap.
However, students who have completed a prior undergraduate degree clearly will have at least two years of study for which they will not be able to use a student loan to cover fees and living expenses.
Some of these students, a minority, might be from wealthy families who are able to support them for these two additional years, but it seems likely for the majority of students in that group the level of support required is beyond the means of most families.
There are ongoing discussions about whether medical and dental students who are affected by the seven-year cap will be able to access bank loans to cover the years, but in any case the seven-year cap will create a significant disincentive to students studying towards a first degree before starting medicine or those who already have an undergraduate degree applying to study medicine.
There are a number of reasons why such a disincentive would be undesirable.
In many countries, particularly in North America, having a first degree is the norm before studying medicine.
More Australian medical schools are encouraging graduate entry, for example Flinders Medical School.
This is viewed as a valuable thing because of the advantages that a grounding in another academic subject or vocation can bring to medicine and the extra maturity such a student brings to their medical studies and the subsequent practice of medicine.
While we are not suggesting that medical schools in New Zealand should become graduate entry, there are a number of reasons why retaining a pathway that makes it possible for the cohort to include some graduate students is valuable.
A first degree is beneficial not only to the medical student who, for example, has an undergraduate degree in genetics or has trained as a nurse, it also enriches the medical cohort as a whole.
For many aspects of medical education, learning is a group activity done in association with a small group of peers and having a mature and more experienced student member of a problem-based learning group is a resource that is beneficial to all of the other students learning in that group.
As experienced medical teachers, responsible for conveying a sense of the ethos of the profession and its integrity in the face of personal, social and political demands that may obscure its vocation, we have both noticed the significant effect that a more mature student can have on a group when they have to turn their minds on the dilemmas that face members of the profession on a daily basis.
A related positive effect is that the medical student cohort, and New Zealand doctors as a profession, become more diverse by allowing different paths of entry to the professional course.
Rather than the profession only comprising students who did very well at school in sciences and then progressed to medicine, making it possible for graduates in other subjects to study medicine enables the profession to, if not mirror, then reflect and understand the diversity of people they are going to deal with in contemporary New Zealand society.
What is more, we often note that the effort required to correct inequalities and under-representation of certain ethnic groups (such as Maori and Pasifika) in medicine means that an extended period of tertiary development is required for some students to grasp their own potential and help to meet the needs of their own cultural groups.
Prioritising the resources that support higher education is a challenging public policy task, but we hope that some solution can be found that means graduates continue to be able to study medicine in New Zealand.
• Prof John McMillan is director of the University of Otago Bioethics Centre. Grant Gillett is professor of biomedical ethics.
