NZVCC Report Highlights University Underfunding
A report released today by the New Zealand Vice-Chancellors Committee (NZVCC) highlights the fact the New Zealand’s
Universities are underfunded and the Government needs to urgently increase levels of funding to public institutions.
“The report shows that New Zealand’s Universities are underfunded when we compare them to Universities overseas,” said
Conor Roberts Co-president of the New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations (NZUSA).
“New Zealand’s public investment per full time student is only $5480, whilst Australian Universities receive $6990 and
United Kingdom Universities receive $7410.”
“If the Government wants tertiary education to be the driver of social and economic progress, then it needs to properly
fund our institutions.”
The report also shows that the 0.9% of GDP which our Government provides to tertiary education institutions is behind
the OECD average of 1.1% and countries such as Canada who spend 1.6%.
“We disagree with the Vice-chancellors that the solution to this problem to ‘rebalance’ the ‘investment’ in tertiary
institutions.”
“The report notes that there has been a substantial rise in Government support for institutions in the ITP sector,
however we believe that fixing the underfunding in Universities should not require cutting funding to the ITP sector.”
“Low levels of public funding is resulting in high and increasing fees, low quality courses, high student to staff
ratios and underpaid staff across the whole tertiary sector.”
“We call upon the Government to immediately increase its contribution to public tertiary education in order to fund the
high quality tertiary education system that New Zealand needs,” Mr Roberts concluded.
ENDS
The full report is available at: http://www.nzvcc.ac.nz/files/geninfo/Investment-Approach-NZ-Universities.pdf