Fee announcement good for students
Changes to the ‘fee maxima’ are good news for students who will have better ability to plan for their qualifications.
The Aotearoa Tertiary Students Association (ATSA) welcomes the Government announcement that tuition and course cost fees
below the maxima will not be able to be increased more than five percent in any given year.
“The changes give students the opportunity to plan with a reasonable degree of certainty how much their qualification
will cost,” says Julie Pettett, President of ATSA.
“Institutions now need to enter into a robust fee setting process to establish if fee increases are justified, in
particular compulsory course costs must be examined with some rigour,” says Pettett.
This is a positive step in stabilising the fee setting experiences of the late nineties which created uncertainty about
how much students must borrow to pay their fees.
Whist ATSA would have liked to see fee reductions we accept that these changes sit in a reasonable middle ground between
the fee freezes of the last three years and the massive increases of the nineties.
“This government has shown a commitment to increased funding for tertiary education organisations; it must now apply the
same principle to addressing the fact that students are the only people in New Zealand who must borrow to live.” Pettett
says.