ABSTRACT
At the age of 16 I needed to win a university entrance scholarship if I were to be allowed to attend university; few if any from the Technical College had previously managed this. The odds were certainly against me, since less than two per cent of university entrants would receive awards, and the successful students would be those who had been well coached in sixth-form grammar-school classes up and down the country. Going to university in those days was much less common than today, although New Zealand was rather better than most countries with about 400 university students per 100 000 of the population-still less than ten per cent of the age group. The student population of Auckland College was then about 12001.
