A very perceptive column by Steven Joyce about university funding, as Victoria and Otago are looking as mass redundancies:
Take international revenue. According to published figures from the Tertiary Education Commission, fees paid to universities by international students dropped by 22 per cent from 2019 to 2021, a loss of $110 million in annual income across the sector. The 2022 figures haven’t been collated yet, but they are likely to include a further drop, especially given what is known as the pipeline effect. Each year the borders were closed, there were fewer international students returning.
The universities have not received any compensation for that revenue loss. It must have been galling to see all the money ladled out to the likes of bungee jumping operations in Queenstown while they were ignored.
A huge revenue loss due to Government decisions around Covid-19, and no compensation. Also as they are public entities they were not even eligible for the wage subsidies.
The Government’s only new funding for universities in its first term was the first year fees-free money, which from the university perspective only replaced one form of funding (student fees) with taxpayers’ money.
A total waste of money. It mainly went to students from well off families, and didn’t increase tertiary participation at all. Rather than invest the hundreds of millions in properly funding universities, they spent it on buying votes from students.
In 2021, ministers increased tuition subsidies by a miserly 1.2 per cent against inflation that year of 5.9 per cent, while in 2022 it was a 2.75 per cent increase, well behind inflation of 7.2 per cent. In this year’s Budget, the Government tried to trumpet a 5 per cent increase in tuition subsidies, but that too is likely to be behind this year’s inflation figure, so in real terms university incomes per student have been going backwards for six years.
So the redundancies are not just because student numbers have fallen. It is because funding has been cut in real terms by Labour.
All this must be quite discombobulating for the Tertiary Education Union. They are the most loyal of the teacher unions to the Labour Party, and in return expect to be looked after. What they have been given by this Government amounts to a cold shoulder. They are left railing at university leaders for all the redundancy plans, and yet still can’t bring themselves to criticise their political soulmates as the root cause of the problem.
The PM and Finance Minister are both former VUWSA Presidents, yet it is their policies that have caused much of the problem.
There are also immediate skills problems for the country which are going begging for lack of funding and a lack of government ambition. The big problem in the health sector is a lack of health professionals and especially doctors, yet we refuse to invest any money to train more. We have just two medical schools while a proposal for a third is left to wither on the vine. Australia has 21 medical schools for a population just five times our size. If we were serious, we would be adding two medical schools, not just one.
NSW has seven medical schools for a population of 8 million. Queensland has four for our population., Western Australia has three with half our population.
You might think all this is a bit rich coming from someone who rails against the excesses of too much government spending. But it is also about what you choose to spend money on, and in this case you don’t have to look far to find pots of money being wasted.
In the tertiary sector alone, Chris Hipkins’ baby, the Te Pūkenga polytech merger, leads a charmed life, despite something like a 20 per cent decline in domestic enrolments over the last two years. $200m has been wasted on that merger so far, and another $220m was advanced in the Budget this year. To try to help Te Pūkenga look better, the Government has hiked up subsidy rates for its courses excessively, in sharp contrast to the universities.
Think if the hundreds of millions spent on the merger instead went to funding universities!
