Part 1: Why are high achieving teens headed overseas and why this is not necessarily a good idea
Part 2: Why going to study overseas, particularly Australia, is not necessarily a good idea
Why are high achieving teens headed overseas and why this is not necessarily a good idea
Ananish Chaudhuri
Ananish Chaudhuri is Professor of Economics at the University of Auckland and the author of “Economics: A Global Introduction.”
- High achieving teens are heading overseas, particularly Australia, because New Zealand universities are increasingly less attractive
- Part of this lack of attraction can be attributed to low levels of government funding that severely limit the quality of education our universities can offer
- This lack of funding is regrettable since universities are the major source of innovations as well as export earnings
- But part of the lack of attraction comes from excessive managerialism and politicization of our university.
NZ Universities are sidelining academic expertise and failing in their duty of care to students
As I have argued elsewhere, a key part of the crisis facing New Zealand universities is government apathy and underfunding. We don’t take tertiary education seriously even though it is one of our biggest export earners and typically a key driver of productivity.
But at the same time universities are compounding this problem via greater corporatisation and a lack of trust between administrators on the one hand and academic staff and students on the other.
Faced with funding pressures universities have engaged in cutting front-line academic and professional staff while the number of managers of various types has steadily increased so that at most institutions non-academic staff vastly outnumber academic staff.
University Councils, which are supposed to exercise oversight, have limited academic representation. University of Auckland’s twelve-member Council has a single representative of academic staff on board. Most members are political appointees with little understanding of a university’s core mission.
Dissonance between academic freedom and managerialism
Two recent cases at the University of Auckland highlight this dissonance between university managers and academics.
As the journalist Graham Adams has highlighted, recently a Professor of Education was instructed by the University’s Equity Office to update her course outline to indicate that sex is not binary but rather a continuum. Now, whether sex is dichotomous, or a continuum, may well be the subject of debate, but it is doubtful that the University’s Equity Office has the requisite expertise to arbitrate this or to instruct a senior academic on this.
A group of senior academics including leading biologists wrote a letter to the University pointing out the fallacy in the Equity Office’s position resulting in an apology to the concerned academic.
A second issue, again highlighted by Graham Adams, deals with the introduction of a set of compulsory courses for all first-year students at the University of Auckland, courses that have faced significant pushback from students taking them. A petition asking the University to cancel these courses has been circulating for a while and has been signed by more than one thousand five hundred current students.
According to information available on the University website one such course WTR 100 “…draws on place-based knowledge to demonstrate how diverse knowledge systems and Te Tiriti o Waitangi shape perspectives and apply in your discipline.”
Questions about recent changes to the curriculum
It has never been clear why it should be mandatory for all students regardless of their discipline to learn about the Treaty. Is this knowledge useful for those working in New Zealand? Possibly. But the vast majority of our students will be looking for jobs overseas.
It is unclear how integrated these courses are or can be with other core subjects students are studying; whether they will complement other courses or merely serve as vehicles for delivering a particular worldview.
It is not surprising that these courses have attracted derision as sources of political indoctrination.
Recent initiatives at Auckland University opposed by a majority of academics
Less recognized is the fact that these courses are part of a broader curriculum transformation that was overwhelmingly voted down by the University’ Senate, which represents academic staff in what the New Zealand Herald referred to as a “unprecedented revolt.” To be sure not everyone was objecting to these specific courses, but there was strong opposition to various aspects of the transformation including the hasty nature of their introduction and the potential disruption from these changes to students’ planned program of studies. The introduction of these compulsory courses requires either elimination or at least postponement of other required courses.
The fundamental problem here is that these initiatives are violating academic freedom. They are being implemented with little or no input from the academics who have the most skin in the game. This has resulted in low morale among staff and a loss in our sense of purpose. This has obvious negative implications for the quality of education we are offering and why we are less attractive to students.
However, having said this, in the second part of this article, I argue that at this point of time at least it still makes sense to study in New Zealand, at least as opposed to Australia since many of the problems afflicting New Zealand universities are universal and the returns on investment from an Australian education may not be higher.
Why going to study overseas, particularly Australia, is not necessarily a good idea
Ananish Chaudhuri
Ananish Chaudhuri is Professor of Economics at the University of Auckland and the author of “Economics: A Global Introduction.”
- The type of managerialism and politicization afflicting New Zealand universities are present in other countries to a greater or lesser degree.
- In spite of significant constraints New Zealand universities still provide high quality education.
- To the extent that students and parents think about the returns on investment from higher education, it is not clear that that an Australian education is superior.
- In terms of returns, what matters more is the discipline studied rather than the institution.
Political activism has infiltrated educational institutions everywhere
In Part 1 of this article, I argued that New Zealand universities have become excessively politicized. Social justice activism is interfering with academic freedom and the quality of the education that we are offering our students. Negative publicity around this is one of the reasons why increasingly many students are looking overseas. Still, I think at this point of time it makes sense for students to study in New Zealand.
However, we need to recognize that when we talk about high achievers leaving, we are mostly talking about the well-off who have the financial ability to pay overseas tuition.
Parents and students should be aware that the type of managerialism, social activism or problems of low morale that I discuss above are not unique to Auckland or even New Zealand. Arguably New Zealand institutions are affected more given our perennial lack of funding and the thin margins we operate on. But going overseas does not necessarily insulate one from such afflictions.
However, anecdotal evidence suggests that, in spite of this politicization, leading Australian schools are providing a student experience that is better than what is on offer at Auckland for instance, smaller classes and better pastoral care. This is almost entirely due to the fact that the good Australian schools are not hurting as much in terms of government funding as we are. This allows them to offer a better product on the whole.
NZ universities are much more homogenous than systems elsewhere. This is partly because the government uses the same funding formula for all universities here. For many New Zealand students (and the firms hiring them), there’s not much difference between a degree from Auckland or Otago. Australia likely has more variance across institutions, which means they have a better chance at selling top-tier students on the idea of attending a “top” school, as in the US.
The NCEA system bears part of the blame. The general perception is that it is not particularly rigorous and not preparing students well for university and beyond. As a result, many schools offer Cambridge or IB in addition to NCEA but the former two are very much geared toward an overseas perspective; students doing Cambridge or IB (often coming from more privileged backgrounds) naturally gravitate toward overseas institutions.
Parents and students should still consider studying in New Zealand
By and large, parents and students consider the money spent on higher education as an investment in the students’ careers.
So, for those who have the money, is going overseas worthwhile in terms of returns to that investment?
Studying in the US or the UK, particularly the former remains prohibitively expensive. Consequently, a lot of students are gravitating toward Australia.
Australia is certainly a bigger market than New Zealand but it is still small compared to the US or Western Europe. Even in Australia, many students will eventually be looking for jobs elsewhere in the West or increasingly in the large Asian markets, China, India, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea.
It is not clear to me that a degree from (say) Sydney or Monash provides one a leg-up in these markets compared to Auckland.
What students and parents often also fail to grasp is that, by and large, across the industrialized West, the income returns to majors (e.g. business vs. humanities) far outweigh the returns to going to a more selective institution.
Students going to Australia do pay domestic fees, but they are not entitled to Study Link, interest free student loans or one year of free university education.
When you consider the additional expense of going to Australia, I doubt that the returns on investment outperform studying in New Zealand.
Given their very high costs, the same would be true of the US and the UK too.
This may change as New Zealand falls further behind on many measures but at this point of time, studying in New Zealand still makes more financial sense.
—ENDS—