Source: Radio New Zealand
RNZ / Richard Tindiller
The Tertiary Education Commission has taken the unusual step of giving multiple tertiary institutions permission to enrol extra students this year as they try to meet a boom in enrolments.
The commission’s chief executive, Tim Fowler, told Parliament’s Education and Workforce Select Committee institutions could enrol up to five percent more students than the government had agreed to fund them for.
“We have always set that as the outer boundary marker above which institutions cannot go without our permission, and it has been extremely rare for us to allow institutions to go above that in any year,” he said.
But Fowler said this year it allowed many more institutions to exceed the five percent limit and it would likely do the same next year.
He said an increase in the number of school-leavers had driven enrolments up across the entire tertiary sector, including polytechnics and private tertiary institutions.
But the number of people in workplace learning, such as apprenticeships, had dropped because many employers had less work and had chosen not to employ apprentices, Fowler said.
He said the number of people in work-based training dropped about 15 percent a year for three consecutive years.
Fowler said the government had provided sufficient funding for 99 percent of projected enrolments.
He said university enrolments rose four percent this year and only one of the eight institutions had enrolled fewer students than the commission had agreed to fund it for this year.
“What we’re mostly seeing is them over-delivering against their small budgeted deficits or small budgeted surpluses,” he said.
Fowler said university finances were constrained but only one was rated as “high risk” financially.
“We have two universities low-risk, we’ve got one high, one medium-high, and the rest medium,” he said.
Fowler said universities’ ability to deliver on capital spending was restricted and they were increasingly reliant on income from foreign students.
He said the institutions were generally managed and governed well.
Fowler said for years the commission had encouraged institutions to improve their students’ course and qualification completion rates and those figures were starting to improve.
He said the date for dissolving super-institute Te Pūkenga had been pushed out to the end of March 2027 because next year’s election could make it difficult to take the final steps necessary to wind it up at the end of 2026.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
