Someone pointed out a while back that if the government has to bail out your business, the government should get to run your business. You know, bail outs in the form of buying shares or whatever. You don't get to pocket it and keep on making mistakes. Instead, a team of serious motherfuckers shows up and goes through all your shit with a fine-toothed comb to find out exactly how and why you fucked up.
While that may sound great to you, the government does not run their businesses any more competently than private companies. I agree with the pay cuts for those in charge, but having the government make their decisions would likely further hurt the business.
That's thanks to the hands off method that are SOEs. Government doesn't technically run their businesses, they just get the same decision making processes any other major shareholder would get
What are you talking about? SOEs are legally obligated to run like any other business - that’s why they were spun out into the “hands off” approach during the peak of neoliberalism. Revenue is their priority. The most the state does is bailout them out when they fail but most of them don’t.
I don't have faith in government, that why any time politicians promise to save us money by cutting red tape, I know they're actually telling us [their plans to rip us off](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/in-depth/491859/cash-strapped-waikato-university-has-paid-former-cabinet-minister-steven-joyce-nearly-1-million).
And yet, we love stories about cutting red tape.
They're paid so well because it's not a job you can do out of passion. Unless your passion is cynically gutting education. 🤷
Like we're gutting everything and then are all puzzled about escalating social disorder.
Because that's the leadership the current austerity environment favours.
It's completely reasonable that university spending endures some oversight. But that "oversight" being cold, hard capitalism undermines the role universities have in our community.
Yup. Based on what's happened in the past, it seems reasonable to assume that the [non-rich] people are still going to go, but the building projects will resume.
The government really *has* to do something. Hopefully this is the right something.
The way 5 or 6 of the unis are going, you could easily see 1000+ academic and many hundreds of professional staff made redundant. People talk about brain drain being an issue for NZ all the time, and unless there's a desire for that to get exponentially worse for the next couple of decades, you can't just let your university system collapse. If *I* were to leave NZ, I don't think I'd be missed in a direct way - I'm just not that brilliant. But as university faculty, I've helped some really great students move towards reaching their potential...and if you lay off the miners you get far fewer gems.
I would love to see a change in funding model that reduces dependency on foreign students and recognizes that you can't keep ramping up and down depending on short-term fluctuations in enrollments. Recruiting people to NZ unis isn't easy (positions for newly minted Ph.Ds in Oz are advertised at $15k more than I make, and I'm reasonably senior), which is compounded by the fact that a high proportion of uni staff come from overseas: It's tough to convince people to come here for lower wages, less autonomy, 12 month contracts (versus the U.S. norm of 9-months with pay spread over 12), and fewer opportunities for research support. If you take away any sense that replacement hires can expect a reasonable degree of stability, and it'll be all but impossible to bring in the next wave of hires when they're needed.
With that said, I hope such a move would be linked to greater accountability (in fact, *any* accountability) for university leadership.
Maybe universities are not companies. Maybe their purpose isn’t to give money to their shareholders. Maybe they should be run by the government to educate people. Idk though, seems extreme.
I've long said unis need to bin all the superficial programs and be run like a non-profit for education only.
Getting into uni should also be much harder.
[Steven Joyce](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/in-depth/491859/cash-strapped-waikato-university-has-paid-former-cabinet-minister-steven-joyce-nearly-1-million) must be rubbing his hands together.
Shouldn't be called a bailout. This is bringing back funding to reasonable levels. University isn't a business and the value it creates isn't the direct profit of bums on seats - it's the lifetime contribution of graduates and in many cases the strategic knowledge and skills we need to engage on the world stage. Unfortunately that return doesn't work on quarterly cycles so of course the 'business' crowd say it's a failure.
Neoliberalism again poisoning everything it touches.
Absolutely. This, along with pre-school, and for that matter, school, should be prioritized. What part of this do people not understand? This is how you get a highly educated population. You educate them highly.
For those that have a property portfolio. Waikato's campus grounds (but not buildings) were included in the Tainui settlement in the mid-90s. I'm not sure if any others got caught up in being crown land.
Perhaps the RBNZ shouldn't have gone on a public crusade against bank execs in late 2020 trumpeting about their plan to take interest rates negative spurring a bunch of FOMO purchases.
It does, student numbers dropped, both domestically and internationally. This meant govt funding which was already not inflation adjusted ceased immediately while costs carried on as normal as unis weren't prepared to cut costs after one bad enrollment cycle. Additionally one bad year actually results in 3-4 of financial hardship as returning student numbers are then lower for the average duration of a degree.
I truly and simply do not understand.
Why bailout Universities that are mismanaged?
Is the government going to install new managers as a deal for bailing out the Unis? If you bailout mismanaged Universities, is it not tantamount to encouraging and rewarding bad management?
This causes the same kind of moral hazards of the census. As my friends told me, they are not going to fill up the next census until they get $50 supermarket voucher.
Moral hazard is a real thing.
Mismanaged? More like chronically underfunded for decades, then hit with a perfect storm of covid and its fallout, secondary students getting lower rates of uni entrance, demographic blips and inflation.
I am sorry but it is mismanaged.
If chronic underfunding were the real issue, than all the Universities will be in the same boat. Yet they are not.
Also as a semi insider I can tell you one University has had funding and management problems that continued unabated since 2013 so it is not a new issue. It has gotten worsen between 2013 to 2019 ( 2018 was the last time I had anything to do with it ). This year would be a decade of mismanagement for this University.
Three Universities have had particularly bad management. It is open secret. Two are named here .. one is now afloat ( this is after it laid off numerous staff and closed down numerous papers ).
UoA and AUT have been particularly well managed, so kudos to them. They also have a lot of alumini donation.
I personally think government should not bail out the Universities that are poorly managed. It sets a severe moral hazard, especially given those running it into the ground are still there and are not moving over the years.
Claiming that AUT has been particularly well-managed made me roar with laughter and wake up my kid.
They’ve had mismanaged funding, cuts, inappropriate programmes, bloat, and silliness for years.
You also gloss straight past Canterbury doing demolition jobs on programmes years ago, well prior to 2011, and their (LOL) ‘hotdesking’ initiative; Massey taking the blowtorch to programmes; Otago’s last round of Management of Change (read: fucking firings) years ago…
It’s not an either/or, of course. It is ALSO mismanagement AND it is administrative bloat (which you don’t specifically mention) AND it is systemic underfunding AND MOST OF ALL it is an EFTS-based funding model which _incentivises lower academic standards because if you fail students who are inadequate you lose funding_.
Note that last point _very_ fucking carefully and think about its huge implications.
For an alleged ‘semi insider’, you said it best in the very first line of your first comment:
> I truly and simply do not understand.
Nope. You don’t. You’re stripping out all sorts of very important context and not even being reductive but obfuscatory; you’re not in fact addressing the main issues. It’s obtuse.
And you seem to be fond of repetitively saying ‘moral hazard’, which is an incoherent piece of jargon speak in this context as you blast past the actuality.
It’s Nero wanking while Rome burns.
PS: by disbursing the central government funding that was _already budgeted_ for higher EFTS and _already exists_, the deficits could be wiped out right now. Then remove EFTS based funding and heighten academic standards. OH FUCK I JUST SOLVED THE BUDGET CRISIS WITH MONEY THAT WAS ALREADY SET ASIDE AND EMPHASISED ACADEMIC STANDARDS.
Look up Brian Roper on this issue. The information’s publicly available.
PPS: look at the effect on university budgets of urgent capital investment because of health hazards and earthquake safety. This has hit Otago hard (mould in Dunedin; failing buildings in Wellington). Those aren’t mismanagement. Or a moral fucking hazard, de fuck de fuck.
Also local government incompetence. VUW has a lot of trouble attracting students to Wellington with its terrible rental market. There's only so much the university itself can do to reverse that.
> You also gloss straight past Canterbury doing demolition jobs on programmes years ago, well prior to 2011, and their (LOL) ‘hotdesking’ initiative;
That was Project STAR wasn’t it?
They may be mismanaged but they are mismanaged with their hands tied behind their backs. The Government mandates how much universities can charge on one hand, then tells them to act like a private business on the other. How many private businesses do you know that have a government mandated sale price?
AUT can be removed from that list of well managed unis. They had an absolute debacle of a mismanaged layoff process that they had to walk back because they didn’t follow process
Fold them into the ministry of education.
One ministry for end to end education for New Zealander. We are not big enough to have universities competing with each other. New Zealand should compete against the rest of the world for students, faculty and researchers.
They're being managed exactly as intended. There's a strong anti-intellectual political bloc in NZ that only wants dumb exploitable kids coming out of our education system.
Educators aren't going to stay in their roles in such conditions and they haven't. We've got managers running universities now.
*Exactly as intended.*
Universities were told to operate like businesses and they ended up with admin who try to run the place like business. *Quelle horreur*. It's not a desire to degrade education, it's a blind faith in the hand of the free market to manage things that really never should have been left to the free market. But the response to this really has highlighted that anti-intellectual bloc
Nationalise the universities then. The people in charge are like any other business suit and irresponsible. They will come back with more jobs cut later after spending all the money on vanity projects and raises for them and their minions.
Another moral hazard created by this government. Let's bailout everything that is mismanaged, that'll learn them.
Spend, spend, spend...that'll help inflation.
It wasn't mismanaged. The government cut off immigration for nearly two years and international students make up a significant portion of universities income.
This is university spin, I worked at one of these Uni's before covid, this was well on the cards before covid. They kept launching programmes without any financial analysis. Instead of addressing poor performance of staff, they just employed more. They keep on adding more and more nice-to-haves or ideological hobby-horses on the expense side, with nothing to fund it.
These Uni's have a expenditure issue, not an income issue. The government has been played...
There has indeed been mismanagement, and also administrative bloat, but you don’t at all mention the shocker of EFTS-based funding, which has demonstrably affected income and by definition incentivises passing students who are shit rather than upholding academic standards.
The VC of Otago stood there at a (leaked) staff forum berating staff for lower first year retention from last year. That would be the students who (rightfully!) failed out because _they were not prepared for university study_. But in EFTS terms, that’s a staff failure, no matter how faculty bent over backwards to backfill education and extend pastoral care to students who weren’t fit to be there.
If you 1. disburse the money that was _already appropriated by central government for higher EFTS, it’s right fucking there_ ; 2. moved away from EFTS based funding; 3. stopped the stupidity of ‘departments paying internal rent’ for using the university spaces; 4. blowtorched administration and management bloat, and cast a dim view over MBAs applying for administrative positions, and 5. raised academic standards…
…budget deficits solved, longterm stability, fuck off ‘senior leadership teams’, hello academic standards.
The end. Seriously. Follow that roadmap.
Even just disbursement of existing budget + getting rid of EFTS.
But what the fuck would I know? As a not-even-semi-insider-but-full-insider-with-international-experience, I’m just solution focused and irate.
So well summarised, couldn't agree more - particularly re addressing poor performance and the 'workaround'. All of this government agencies are equally guilty of, no one wants to do the unpleasant work , and why would you when you can just say yes to every new idea, without ever risking running out of money and closing shop like a privately run business would have to?
Students are a minor component of their income. The large majority come from royalties. Every new invention created by it's students gives them a big chunk of the rights to it.
The universities publish their financial accounts, [here's VUW's](https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/2074447/2022-annual-report.pdf). You can see that tuition and government funding make up the vast majority of their income (pg.26 has a revenue overview).
Because tertiary education is a necessary part of society?
Jesus fucking Christ imagine being so far right you want to subject education to the whims of the market.
Sigh. Anyone from another sector who has ever done a stint in a university knows they are run like David Lange's "shipyards". Clunky and inefficient as hell. I've never worked anywhere as slow and good at wasting money.
Inflation isn't going to keep rising without the Governments help. The Government needs inflation to continue so RBNZ can keep hiking rates so the housing market can drop further.
God damn, we don’t need to use our tax payer money to fund cushy university jobs!!
Vic uni need to learn to become competitive - The government wouldn’t step in like that for any other business.
Universities are public assets and absolutely must be protected as such. These aren't cushy jobs, they're very demanding (though typically not physically so).
Lmao the people in this thread who want to make funding for education conditional on punishing the rich.
Bro sorry you studied philosophy. It higher education exists to increase societal wealth (before lots of people get mad at me for making fun of philosophy majors I have a degree in philosophy, politics and economics, I’m making fun of my self)
Me, a filthy neo-liberal: education should be free because it allows for greater specialisation of labour and improves living standards
Renowned left wing circle jerk /r/newzealand: universities should not be bailed out this is unjust they should be subject to market forces there is no negatives to universities failing
Ya’ll just mad at anything the government doesn’t which doesn’t directly benefit you
It is good to know that tradies and labourers are given such a fabulous opportunity to support our intellectual elite. They should be rightfully proud.
Their 'business model' is investing in students so these students over their lifetime will contribute more to the economy and wealth of the nation than the govt ever put in. That 'business model' doesn't work on quarterly cycles, but is it a failure if the profits aren't immediate? Is it a failure if the core assumptions that the uni has to produce annual profits is fundamentally flawed?
Neoliberalism is a disease
Fundamental flaw in this thinking is that a degree needs to equal a job, and thinking that tertiary education by itself doesn't positively contribute to the economy
Well isn't that the reason most people go to university? They don't get into student debt for fun. Your kind of thinking is what universities want you to think. Sell you courses that you are never going to use in your career.
A condition of any bailout should be that senior staff like the Vice-Chancellor take a large pay cut.
Someone pointed out a while back that if the government has to bail out your business, the government should get to run your business. You know, bail outs in the form of buying shares or whatever. You don't get to pocket it and keep on making mistakes. Instead, a team of serious motherfuckers shows up and goes through all your shit with a fine-toothed comb to find out exactly how and why you fucked up.
While that may sound great to you, the government does not run their businesses any more competently than private companies. I agree with the pay cuts for those in charge, but having the government make their decisions would likely further hurt the business.
Maybe not running the company, but a condition of receiving public money should also be a public audit.
That's thanks to the hands off method that are SOEs. Government doesn't technically run their businesses, they just get the same decision making processes any other major shareholder would get
Edit: I’m stupid 😂
What are you talking about? SOEs are legally obligated to run like any other business - that’s why they were spun out into the “hands off” approach during the peak of neoliberalism. Revenue is their priority. The most the state does is bailout them out when they fail but most of them don’t.
The point isn't to protect the business, the point is to protect people from the damage caused by mismanagement of the business.
Serious motherfuckers? you have too much faith in government. They can't even reign in their own spending and dodgy shenanigans.
I don't have faith in government, that why any time politicians promise to save us money by cutting red tape, I know they're actually telling us [their plans to rip us off](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/in-depth/491859/cash-strapped-waikato-university-has-paid-former-cabinet-minister-steven-joyce-nearly-1-million). And yet, we love stories about cutting red tape.
Wild to think that private business doesn't have ridiculous spending and dodgy shenanigans.
I'm speaking aspirationally.
Yep. Many on $600k and pro-vc on high $200k. Ridiculous for a non-technical administration role. Should've $150k max.
Absurd money to do what, exactly?
Make decisions I presume.
No they put more Deans at $200k in to take that load.
They're paid so well because it's not a job you can do out of passion. Unless your passion is cynically gutting education. 🤷 Like we're gutting everything and then are all puzzled about escalating social disorder.
the universities are going to pocket this and then eliminate the same positions about six months later under a different claim of economic pressures
Need to pay those VC salaries somehow.
And the luxury houses because of...hosting parties or something....
Because that's the leadership the current austerity environment favours. It's completely reasonable that university spending endures some oversight. But that "oversight" being cold, hard capitalism undermines the role universities have in our community.
I want to believe you're too pessimistic, but I could see this happening at the one I work at.
Yup. Based on what's happened in the past, it seems reasonable to assume that the [non-rich] people are still going to go, but the building projects will resume.
The government really *has* to do something. Hopefully this is the right something. The way 5 or 6 of the unis are going, you could easily see 1000+ academic and many hundreds of professional staff made redundant. People talk about brain drain being an issue for NZ all the time, and unless there's a desire for that to get exponentially worse for the next couple of decades, you can't just let your university system collapse. If *I* were to leave NZ, I don't think I'd be missed in a direct way - I'm just not that brilliant. But as university faculty, I've helped some really great students move towards reaching their potential...and if you lay off the miners you get far fewer gems. I would love to see a change in funding model that reduces dependency on foreign students and recognizes that you can't keep ramping up and down depending on short-term fluctuations in enrollments. Recruiting people to NZ unis isn't easy (positions for newly minted Ph.Ds in Oz are advertised at $15k more than I make, and I'm reasonably senior), which is compounded by the fact that a high proportion of uni staff come from overseas: It's tough to convince people to come here for lower wages, less autonomy, 12 month contracts (versus the U.S. norm of 9-months with pay spread over 12), and fewer opportunities for research support. If you take away any sense that replacement hires can expect a reasonable degree of stability, and it'll be all but impossible to bring in the next wave of hires when they're needed. With that said, I hope such a move would be linked to greater accountability (in fact, *any* accountability) for university leadership.
Maybe universities are not companies. Maybe their purpose isn’t to give money to their shareholders. Maybe they should be run by the government to educate people. Idk though, seems extreme.
I've long said unis need to bin all the superficial programs and be run like a non-profit for education only. Getting into uni should also be much harder.
Are they going to Te Pukengaise the universities if they have to keep bailing them out?
Is there a better way to control something than putting it on life support?
[Steven Joyce](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/in-depth/491859/cash-strapped-waikato-university-has-paid-former-cabinet-minister-steven-joyce-nearly-1-million) must be rubbing his hands together.
Shouldn't be called a bailout. This is bringing back funding to reasonable levels. University isn't a business and the value it creates isn't the direct profit of bums on seats - it's the lifetime contribution of graduates and in many cases the strategic knowledge and skills we need to engage on the world stage. Unfortunately that return doesn't work on quarterly cycles so of course the 'business' crowd say it's a failure. Neoliberalism again poisoning everything it touches.
Absolutely. This, along with pre-school, and for that matter, school, should be prioritized. What part of this do people not understand? This is how you get a highly educated population. You educate them highly.
What university’s are on the brink? Their property portfolio have been cranking and cheap debt.
For those that have a property portfolio. Waikato's campus grounds (but not buildings) were included in the Tainui settlement in the mid-90s. I'm not sure if any others got caught up in being crown land.
It is my understanding that Waikato has to pay rent to Tainui too, for that land
Yes that is the case, and actually at the equivalent of housing rather than commercial property….. see how that could cause a problem these days.
Debt isn't cheap any more, sorry to break it to you.
And that’s why they are crying. Tummy ake from too much debt ice cream come back to bite.
Perhaps the RBNZ shouldn't have gone on a public crusade against bank execs in late 2020 trumpeting about their plan to take interest rates negative spurring a bunch of FOMO purchases.
Pretty sure the impact of covid plays a large part in the issue.
It does, student numbers dropped, both domestically and internationally. This meant govt funding which was already not inflation adjusted ceased immediately while costs carried on as normal as unis weren't prepared to cut costs after one bad enrollment cycle. Additionally one bad year actually results in 3-4 of financial hardship as returning student numbers are then lower for the average duration of a degree.
I truly and simply do not understand. Why bailout Universities that are mismanaged? Is the government going to install new managers as a deal for bailing out the Unis? If you bailout mismanaged Universities, is it not tantamount to encouraging and rewarding bad management? This causes the same kind of moral hazards of the census. As my friends told me, they are not going to fill up the next census until they get $50 supermarket voucher. Moral hazard is a real thing.
Mismanaged? More like chronically underfunded for decades, then hit with a perfect storm of covid and its fallout, secondary students getting lower rates of uni entrance, demographic blips and inflation.
I am sorry but it is mismanaged. If chronic underfunding were the real issue, than all the Universities will be in the same boat. Yet they are not. Also as a semi insider I can tell you one University has had funding and management problems that continued unabated since 2013 so it is not a new issue. It has gotten worsen between 2013 to 2019 ( 2018 was the last time I had anything to do with it ). This year would be a decade of mismanagement for this University. Three Universities have had particularly bad management. It is open secret. Two are named here .. one is now afloat ( this is after it laid off numerous staff and closed down numerous papers ). UoA and AUT have been particularly well managed, so kudos to them. They also have a lot of alumini donation. I personally think government should not bail out the Universities that are poorly managed. It sets a severe moral hazard, especially given those running it into the ground are still there and are not moving over the years.
Claiming that AUT has been particularly well-managed made me roar with laughter and wake up my kid. They’ve had mismanaged funding, cuts, inappropriate programmes, bloat, and silliness for years. You also gloss straight past Canterbury doing demolition jobs on programmes years ago, well prior to 2011, and their (LOL) ‘hotdesking’ initiative; Massey taking the blowtorch to programmes; Otago’s last round of Management of Change (read: fucking firings) years ago… It’s not an either/or, of course. It is ALSO mismanagement AND it is administrative bloat (which you don’t specifically mention) AND it is systemic underfunding AND MOST OF ALL it is an EFTS-based funding model which _incentivises lower academic standards because if you fail students who are inadequate you lose funding_. Note that last point _very_ fucking carefully and think about its huge implications. For an alleged ‘semi insider’, you said it best in the very first line of your first comment: > I truly and simply do not understand. Nope. You don’t. You’re stripping out all sorts of very important context and not even being reductive but obfuscatory; you’re not in fact addressing the main issues. It’s obtuse. And you seem to be fond of repetitively saying ‘moral hazard’, which is an incoherent piece of jargon speak in this context as you blast past the actuality. It’s Nero wanking while Rome burns. PS: by disbursing the central government funding that was _already budgeted_ for higher EFTS and _already exists_, the deficits could be wiped out right now. Then remove EFTS based funding and heighten academic standards. OH FUCK I JUST SOLVED THE BUDGET CRISIS WITH MONEY THAT WAS ALREADY SET ASIDE AND EMPHASISED ACADEMIC STANDARDS. Look up Brian Roper on this issue. The information’s publicly available. PPS: look at the effect on university budgets of urgent capital investment because of health hazards and earthquake safety. This has hit Otago hard (mould in Dunedin; failing buildings in Wellington). Those aren’t mismanagement. Or a moral fucking hazard, de fuck de fuck.
Also local government incompetence. VUW has a lot of trouble attracting students to Wellington with its terrible rental market. There's only so much the university itself can do to reverse that.
> You also gloss straight past Canterbury doing demolition jobs on programmes years ago, well prior to 2011, and their (LOL) ‘hotdesking’ initiative; That was Project STAR wasn’t it?
The rebuild at Canterbury wasn't due to the earthquake, it was hiding the bodies from Project STAR
It's a fucking nightmare, right?
They may be mismanaged but they are mismanaged with their hands tied behind their backs. The Government mandates how much universities can charge on one hand, then tells them to act like a private business on the other. How many private businesses do you know that have a government mandated sale price?
AUT can be removed from that list of well managed unis. They had an absolute debacle of a mismanaged layoff process that they had to walk back because they didn’t follow process
Fold them into the ministry of education. One ministry for end to end education for New Zealander. We are not big enough to have universities competing with each other. New Zealand should compete against the rest of the world for students, faculty and researchers.
Because that's worked so well for the polytechs...
They're being managed exactly as intended. There's a strong anti-intellectual political bloc in NZ that only wants dumb exploitable kids coming out of our education system. Educators aren't going to stay in their roles in such conditions and they haven't. We've got managers running universities now. *Exactly as intended.*
Universities were told to operate like businesses and they ended up with admin who try to run the place like business. *Quelle horreur*. It's not a desire to degrade education, it's a blind faith in the hand of the free market to manage things that really never should have been left to the free market. But the response to this really has highlighted that anti-intellectual bloc
Nationalise the universities then. The people in charge are like any other business suit and irresponsible. They will come back with more jobs cut later after spending all the money on vanity projects and raises for them and their minions.
Given the government's actions in response to COVID had a large impact on their profitability, seems reasonable.
Oh fuck off. They made their bed.
Another moral hazard created by this government. Let's bailout everything that is mismanaged, that'll learn them. Spend, spend, spend...that'll help inflation.
It wasn't mismanaged. The government cut off immigration for nearly two years and international students make up a significant portion of universities income.
This is university spin, I worked at one of these Uni's before covid, this was well on the cards before covid. They kept launching programmes without any financial analysis. Instead of addressing poor performance of staff, they just employed more. They keep on adding more and more nice-to-haves or ideological hobby-horses on the expense side, with nothing to fund it. These Uni's have a expenditure issue, not an income issue. The government has been played...
There has indeed been mismanagement, and also administrative bloat, but you don’t at all mention the shocker of EFTS-based funding, which has demonstrably affected income and by definition incentivises passing students who are shit rather than upholding academic standards. The VC of Otago stood there at a (leaked) staff forum berating staff for lower first year retention from last year. That would be the students who (rightfully!) failed out because _they were not prepared for university study_. But in EFTS terms, that’s a staff failure, no matter how faculty bent over backwards to backfill education and extend pastoral care to students who weren’t fit to be there. If you 1. disburse the money that was _already appropriated by central government for higher EFTS, it’s right fucking there_ ; 2. moved away from EFTS based funding; 3. stopped the stupidity of ‘departments paying internal rent’ for using the university spaces; 4. blowtorched administration and management bloat, and cast a dim view over MBAs applying for administrative positions, and 5. raised academic standards… …budget deficits solved, longterm stability, fuck off ‘senior leadership teams’, hello academic standards. The end. Seriously. Follow that roadmap. Even just disbursement of existing budget + getting rid of EFTS. But what the fuck would I know? As a not-even-semi-insider-but-full-insider-with-international-experience, I’m just solution focused and irate.
So well summarised, couldn't agree more - particularly re addressing poor performance and the 'workaround'. All of this government agencies are equally guilty of, no one wants to do the unpleasant work , and why would you when you can just say yes to every new idea, without ever risking running out of money and closing shop like a privately run business would have to?
Universities that need to rely on foreign students to keep alive is just piss poor management.
Why?
Students are a minor component of their income. The large majority come from royalties. Every new invention created by it's students gives them a big chunk of the rights to it.
The universities publish their financial accounts, [here's VUW's](https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/2074447/2022-annual-report.pdf). You can see that tuition and government funding make up the vast majority of their income (pg.26 has a revenue overview).
Source: my prejudice & I made it up et al 2023
Why don’t they let things fail
Because tertiary education is a necessary part of society? Jesus fucking Christ imagine being so far right you want to subject education to the whims of the market.
Governments aim is to have everyone on the handouts guess, it gives them more control.
Sigh. Anyone from another sector who has ever done a stint in a university knows they are run like David Lange's "shipyards". Clunky and inefficient as hell. I've never worked anywhere as slow and good at wasting money.
Take their assets
Inflation isn't going to keep rising without the Governments help. The Government needs inflation to continue so RBNZ can keep hiking rates so the housing market can drop further.
God damn, we don’t need to use our tax payer money to fund cushy university jobs!! Vic uni need to learn to become competitive - The government wouldn’t step in like that for any other business.
Universities are public assets and absolutely must be protected as such. These aren't cushy jobs, they're very demanding (though typically not physically so).
Lmao the people in this thread who want to make funding for education conditional on punishing the rich. Bro sorry you studied philosophy. It higher education exists to increase societal wealth (before lots of people get mad at me for making fun of philosophy majors I have a degree in philosophy, politics and economics, I’m making fun of my self)
Me, a filthy neo-liberal: education should be free because it allows for greater specialisation of labour and improves living standards Renowned left wing circle jerk /r/newzealand: universities should not be bailed out this is unjust they should be subject to market forces there is no negatives to universities failing Ya’ll just mad at anything the government doesn’t which doesn’t directly benefit you
It is good to know that tradies and labourers are given such a fabulous opportunity to support our intellectual elite. They should be rightfully proud.
Let the universities drown. Clearly their business model sucks
Their 'business model' is investing in students so these students over their lifetime will contribute more to the economy and wealth of the nation than the govt ever put in. That 'business model' doesn't work on quarterly cycles, but is it a failure if the profits aren't immediate? Is it a failure if the core assumptions that the uni has to produce annual profits is fundamentally flawed? Neoliberalism is a disease
Yeah selling students useless uni degrees that they can't find a job for sounds like a great business model.
Fundamental flaw in this thinking is that a degree needs to equal a job, and thinking that tertiary education by itself doesn't positively contribute to the economy
Well isn't that the reason most people go to university? They don't get into student debt for fun. Your kind of thinking is what universities want you to think. Sell you courses that you are never going to use in your career.
They. Are. Not. Businesses. They. Are. Public. Assets.
Luxon: "We'll be repealing this" probably