Articles and comments on tertiary education by Roger Smyth
2025
How do soft skills affect the outcomes of people’s tertiary education
One of the most important challenges in assessing the outcomes of tertiary education is how to weigh educational attainment against other factors that influence outcomes. Soft skills for instance. Employers are often heard discussing how much they value of soft skills — factors and traits like ambition, conscientiousness, emotional stability.
So how do those soft skills weigh against educational qualifications and cognitive skills (like literacy, numeracy and problem solving) in contributing to outcomes, outcomes in work as well as in life? How do they intersect with people’s personal circumstances (like their family commitments) and demographic factors? We haven’t had measures of soft skills to answer that sort of question …. until now.
At the end of last month, the OECD published a new report from the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills that included measures of respondents’ social and emotional skills alongside measures of their skills and educational attainment as well as data on their employment, earnings, family status ….
A rich and powerful resource. Covering 29 countries. Including Aotearoa NZ. In this new post, I look at just some of the NZ results, comparing us with the rest of the participating countries, giving a sense of the richness and importance of this new resource ….
11 November 2025
A national tertiary student survey for Aotearoa New Zealand
One important means of understanding how teaching contributes to learning in tertiary education is to capture student views. While many TEOs do survey their students, they mostly do so separately, in an uncoordinated way and many TEOs are not good at closing the loop — at making the results public. Other countries we typically compare ourselves with (Ireland, the four countries of the UK and Australia, for instance) have national surveys and transparent reporting of survey results. And in the US and Canada, there is a leading student engagement survey run in hundreds of universities. But not here.
There was an opportunity for TEOs to work together using a standard survey in the early years of this century when some of our institutions (occasionally) took part in the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement (AUSSE), a survey developed by the Australian Council for Educational Research. But that lapsed when the Australian government created their national suite of surveys — the Quality Indicators of Teaching and Learning project.
A national survey with minimum standards of disclosure would be a big step forward for NZ. Despite a consensus view to the contrary, it isn’t something to be feared. AND it could create a serious research resource…
A great opportunity, a valuable opportunity ….
15 September 2025
The black box of teaching and learning in NZ’s tertiary education system
With an electoral commitment to restructure VET and a need to contribute to the government’s fiscal targets, the Minister has signalled cuts to three measures that support the improvement of teaching and learning in tertiary education. Measures that she told Cabinet are “nice-to-have”. In my view, they were — they are — very, very nice to have. I regret their demise.
To keep teaching and learning quality high, to foster improvement, we need grounded, practice-oriented research on the delivery tertiary education. And we need mechanisms that disseminate the findings, making them available across the system. This opinion piece explains why this has just got harder.
10 September 2025
How has university research performance changed over time?
The cancellation of the 2026 PBRF quality evaluation means that NZ is soon to get a changed approach to research funding. While we wait for the news of what is likely to happen, it’s useful to look at how university research performance has changed . Has the big lift in research performance seen in the first decade of this century been maintained? How do the trends in research performance in NZ universities compare with what has happened in similar countries? What are the implications for how the government might be thinking of the redesign of the research funding system here? This new post takes a quick look at those questions.
20 August 2025
Our homogeneous university system
Some commentators have argued that many high-calibre school leavers head overseas for their university study, creating a market for firms like Crimson Education, a consultancy that helps school leavers win places at prestige overseas universities. Ministry of Education research suggests that the number going overseas for undergraduate study is less than alarmist commentators suggest …. Even so, it raises a question: why would school leavers want to shun our system?
This post explores one of the features of our system that most annoys some commentators: sure, all of our universities are of good quality, but we lack an elite institution, one that commands the sort of status and reputation we associate with leading US and European universities. Having looked at the evidence, I discuss how that situation arose and the trade-offs that would come from tilting the system.
17 August 2025
Funding of tertiary and vocational education for the construction and infrastructure sector
This project – completed in association with Mischewski Consulting and commissioned by ConCoVE Tūhura – explores options for the future of funding of construction and infrastructure training. The project resulted in a discussion paper that summarises six more substantive papers that explore the weaknesses of the current funding system, summarise international best practice in VET funding, report on a set of key informant interviews and create a possible framework for a possible new funding system – one that supports learners better, shifts the locus of decision-making and enables providers to take a more strategic stance in its training.
As well as reading the papers, you can watch a podcast in which Brenden Mischewski and I present the findings of our research and answer questions.
29 May 2025
In this podcast, I talk to Alex Usher (from Higher Education Strategy Associates, Toronto) about tertiary education reform in New Zealand in 2025, covering the UAG, the demerger of Te Pukenga and other matters. This is part of Alex’s weekly series The World of Higher Education.
You can read the transcript here, listen here or, better still, watch at this link.
22 May 2025
2024
Do we really need this comprehensive review of our university system?
The UAG’s third round of submissions raised for me the question: Is a comprehensive, strategic review of our university system really necessary? Yes, there were financial problems, and the previous government had commissioned a review of the funding model in mid-2023. But this comprehensive review …. ? We all know that the government is putting a great deal of weight on the performance of the education system as an important contributor to future prosperity. But is our university system performance such as to warrant that sort of comprehensive review?
In this post, I take a quick look at some comparative data ….
And here is a copy of my response to the UAG’s Round 3 call for submissions.
19 December 2024
The University Advisory Group – Phase 2 Submissions
All over the system, people and organisations are working on their responses to 17 searching questions that are shaping the deliberations. of the University Advisory Group, set up to undertake the first comprehensive review of the university system in 20+ years.
My trouble was this: 17 questions to be answered in a maximum of five pages! Responses that I had hoped would have been built on the evidence, the research, the experience of the last 20 years, the experiences of systems in other countries. That’s a challenge.
So what I have done is:
- restricted myself to only three questions (one of which has three parts)
- presented the five executive summaries as my five-page submission
- included in the formal submission a link to each of those fuller papers.
Here is the first ….
Question 4, Part 1, Beyond quality assurance, what incentives or policies are needed or desirable to promote excellence in teaching?
Question 4, Part 2, Beyond quality assurance, what incentives or policies are needed or desirable to promote excellence in research?
Question 4, Part 3, Beyond quality assurance, what incentives or policies are needed or desirable to promote excellence in knowledge transfer?
Question 17: Are the policy-setting structures and arrangements for higher education optimal? Are there options for improvement?
27, 28, 29, 30 August 2024
Reforming the VET system in Aotearoa New Zealand
Any day now, we can expect the government to release its blueprint for the new vocational education system to be created from the ashes of Te Pūkenga. In this article, I take a look at the history – how did we get to this point? And what does that tell us about what we should look for in the blueprint? What principles should underpin the new VET system?
16 July 2024
As the next UK general election gets closer, there have been calls for the cancellation of the next round of the Research Excellence Framework – the British equivalent of our PBRF quality evaluation. And the opposition shadow minister for science has declined to say that an incoming Labour government would allow the REF to proceed in its newly minted form. Does any of that ring a bell for us in Aotearoa New Zealand?
This new (short) post, on the London School of Economics Impact Blog site, tells the story of the PBRF cancellation and traces the parallels between the NZ experience and the situation the UK may face post election.
LSE Impact Blog 19 April 2024
There’s not much that gets tertiary education folk talking like the PBRF. I’ve had lots of feedback on the first two posts in my PBRF
series. Some of that feedback has prompted a couple of new strands of analysis.
In this third post, I look to test my possible alternative to the controversial, high cost quality evaluation that underpins the PBRF, my straw man suggestion. That alternative would lead to change in the allocation of funding. So I simulate the effects of the alternative and I use that simulation to test my straw man, to ask: Exactly how much change would it generate? And is the change well-aligned to the purpose of the PBRF?
Plus…. Applying a change to a static situation is one thing. But the true test is not how it allocates the funding on Day One. What’s more challenging is trying to assess how the change would influence and modify system behaviour in the future.
This new article explores those two questions. And if you are interested in the data, don’t neglect the Appendix where the detailed analysis is laid out.
30 March 2024
The PBRF challenge Part 2: designing an alternative
If the PBRF has challenges, if it generates rancour, if it involves very high compliance costs and if, as many argue, the returns are likely to diminish …. how might it be changed but still maintain the momentum of higher education research? Building on the principles established in Part 1, I look at options for a redesign, an approach that replaces the current quality evaluation with simpler, low-compliance measures.
Will this new suggestion do the trick? I leave to you to ponder that question.
17 March 2024
The PBRF challenge Part: 1 the issues
Few topics in Aotearoa New Zealand’s higher education system arouse as much passion as the Performance-Based Research Fund. Its advocates point to evidence that the PBRF has lifted the quality of, research in NZ’s tertiary education institutions over the last 20 years. Yet it is criticised – often bitterly – by academics. And it carries the burden of very high compliance costs – for individual academics, for institutions and for the TEC. Recently, the chief executive of the TEC told MPs that the “back-breaking” compliance burden and likely diminishing returns means that the value of the PBRF the system is becoming questionable. Expert commentator Dave Guerin said “A simpler system should be found to maintain the positive changes that the PBRF created”. That is a challenge.
In this article, Part 1 of a two-part series, I unpick the policy design of the PBRF and set out the principles that should underpin a higher education research funding system for NZ. In Part 2, I will set out how the government might think about a changed approach.
10 March 2024
The new tertiary education minister has taken office facing many challenges. But she has one top priority. She wants to unpick Te Pūkenga, the national provider of vocational education and training, created in 2020 by the previous government through the merger of the country’s 16 polytechnics and the 12 industry training organisations. A complex task, one that involves a reshaping of the whole of the VET system.
In this article, I look at how the demerger might be designed and I identify four essential features that our VET system needs if it is to flourish following the demerger of Te Pūkenga.
18 February 2024
The failed fees free policy in New Zealand – a World of Higher Education Podcast
Canadian higher education expert and consultant, Alex Usher, interviewed me on New Zealand’s fees free first year policy and on the incoming coalition government’s changes to that policy. The interview was part of Alex’s World of Higher Education podcast series – a weekly series that discusses higher education developments throughout the world. Alex asked about the NZ Labour government’s fees free policy introduced in 2018, its intention and how it worked and the policy of the new National-led coalition to shift to free fees for students’ final year from 2025.
The link above takes you to a page where you can listen to the interview or read a transcript.
World of Higher Education, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 25 January 2024
2023
A new take on fees free from a new government
Under MMP, negotiating a coalition deal is always going to be complicated. A three way deal with finely balanced interests will always involve someone swallowing a dead rat. So our new coalition government is changing the fees free policy from 2025 – what was the first year fees free will become the final year fees free.
Yes, there’s lots of policy work needed to decide how that will operate. But first, there is a bigger question …. What is this shift aiming to achieve? Does this change actually make any difference? Is it even a good idea? Or just another example of wasteful government expense?
I look at the evidence on the relationship between fees, participation and performance to check this new idea out.
5 December 2023
Education for young people at risk – the challenge … and the opportunity
As she moves into her new office, the incoming Minister for Tertiary Education and Skills faces one critical challenge: what to do about foundation education for young people at risk. The current programmes are not succeeding in helping young people into sustainable employment. But that challenge also presents an opportunity.…
This post is a briefing I developed for the new minister in conjunction with Community Colleges Ltd, a charitable company that delivers services to young people at risk across the South Island.
I look at the performance of the current programmes and the evidence for what works for those at risk of long-term limited employment. And I describe a Community Colleges programme whose design reflects that evidence – it’s a programme that is working, that is delivering.
30 November 2023
AUT and the Times Higher Education ranking – much ado about not very much
When the Times Higher Education published its latest ranking of universities, a couple of New Zealand universities experienced a drop in rank – including AUT (which fell from the top 300 to the top 500 …).
In this post, I dig into the data to explain AUT’s fall and to examine its significance. Has something gone wrong? Has AUT’s performance suddenly slipped? Lost its edge?
The answer: NO! Read on to find out what’s going on …
3 October 2023
What can Australia learn from the NZ Tertiary Education Commission?
In this podcast in the HEDx series, I discuss the 2000-2002 TEAC reforms with HEDx founder Martin Betts and Massey University provost Giselle Byrnes and explore parallels with the Australian Universities Accord. Our conversation covers the drivers of the NZ reforms, how that led to the creation of the TEC, how the TEC has evolved and the expectations for the role of a new tertiary education commission described in the Accord interim report.
On the HEDx website, you can also find a short article in which Martin, Giselle and I set out some of the major issues raised in the podcast.
27 September 2023
We all know that there are disparities in participation and attainment between ethnic groups in our tertiary education system. This is something we all – institutions, government, the public – need to take responsibility for. This needs fixing. The TEC has asked each provider to develop a learner success plan and to nominate a date by which it will achieve parity.
Parity. Not just equity. This is about eliminating ethnic-based differences in achievement. That’s a major challenge to providers.
In this post, we look at the factors that are associated with disparities in performance in tertiary education. Disparities have their origins in deep divisions in society …. in the past … in factors outside of control of providers. So providers are looking to learner analytics, sharing best practice in providing academic support …. But this is a really difficult challenge. But most institutions have declared that they are up for it.
Having reviewed the evidence on the origins of disparity, this article asks what lessons are there for institutions and for the TEC in how we measure and report on institutions’ progress towards disparity ….
21 September 2023
Two difficult questions you won’t hear about this election year …
It’s election year.
Election campaign debates are for hot issues – things like how good/bad the Te Pūkenga venture has been. Or like should we have a new medical school rather than expanding training in the existing medical schools. Or questions about higher education finances. Or even the upcoming review of the HE funding system. Not for complex evidence-based interventions that may take years to develop and resolve.
But what are the complex difficult issues that will face the incoming tertiary education minister following the election, the parts of the system that are still not working well, despite years of design and redesign.
This series of three posts looks at features of the NZ tertiary education system that need redesign work, but that almost certainly will be ignored in the election debates. But let’s hope they are matters that the incoming minister looks at and asks for advice on.
This post reviews the literature on student decision making and asks “How does the design of the allowances system work? How successful is the allowances system in addressing the critical question of access to tertiary education?” The answer may be uncomfortable for some – it certainly won’t make me any friends. But I hope it makes you think. And I hope the incoming government does something to address the problems.
13 August 2023
Part 2: Making successful transitions
The post deals with transitions programmes, active labour market programmes, like Youth Guarantee. It reviews the literature to explore why some young people reach the end of schooling ill-prepared for higher levels of training and not yet ready for the world of work. It assesses the performance of the main programmes developed by government, with agency help, to help those young people make the transition … How well do they work? Are they any better than the similar programmes of the past? And what does the literature tell us about the characteristics of successful transition programmes?
17 August 2023
The first two parts of this series were straightforward. They looked at two areas where the tertiary education system is failing. The hard bit is to ask: what could an incoming government do to address the problems described in Parts 1 and 2, to change the settings, to fix things up,. To fix problems where there are no easy fixes.
21 August 2023
Over in Australia, the Accord group – set up to do a once-in-a-generation review of higher education – has delivered its interim report. And they have picked up on the idea of a new body to steer the system – a tertiary education commission.. Sounds familiar to New Zealanders! What could they learn from our experience?
In this article in Future Campus, I draw from the NZ experience to explore the implications of an Australian TEC. And in the process, I shed light on a challenging but interesting period in the history of our system … Read on.
Future Campus 3 August 2023
We all know that New Zealand’s universities are facing financial challenges. In the face of vociferous protest, the government has injected some extra funding for the next two years – two years in which it proposes to conduct a review – a major review – of the whole of the higher education funding system.
OK, it’s election year and we don’t know who will be minister from October … but let’s just suppose that this review is going ahead as planned.
What does history tell us about the nature of grand reviews of funding systems? What should a review address? What questions should it ask? This post explores those questions – it provides a set of signposts for the review.
18 July 2023
What is really happening to the humanities in NZ universities?
“Is the BA dying?” asked the cover of the NZ Listener recently.
is it really true that the arts subjects are in decline NZ’s tertiary education system? If so, which arts subjects are particularly suffering? If so, why has this occurred? Don’t BA graduates get jobs? If the arts subjects – the humanities in particular – are suffering, how will this play out as universities deal with their current financial challenges? Will the new funding announced by the government change things?
This article addresses these important questions … Read it here
28 June 2023
What’s ailing our universities?
2022 was the worst year ever for our universities’ finances. And now, several are consulting on staff cuts. What’s going on? With seven of the eight universities having released their 2022 annual reports, I look behind the headlines at what the data are telling us. And I look at the likely outlook for the next few years. Is it really a trade-off between job cuts and the pain of “a thousand cuts” ? Read on …
5 June 2023
The Australian Universities Accord: A unified tertiary education system?
One common thread in the Australian Accord submissions is the wish to unify the tertiary education system – to remove the sharp divide between the higher education and vocational education systems. That’s something that we started in NZ more than 30 years ago. But is regulatory harmonisation the answer to increasing mobility? This CMM article looks at the evidence.
Campus Morning Mail 24 May 2023
The Australian Universities Accord: A tertiary education commission for Australia?
The new Labor government in Australia set up an expert advisory group to reimagine its tertiary education system. As part of that “Accord” process, some groups have proposed setting up an Australian tertiary education commission.
Didn’t an incoming Labour-led government in NZ do something very similar after the 1999 election? And didn’t that expert advisory group recommend that NZ set up a tertiary education commission? This article looks at what our Australian cousins might learn from the NZ experience.
Part 1 looks at the policy evolved and how the idea of a TEC played out in practice in NZ
Part 2 looks at the implications for the Australian proposal and at how a tertiary education commission might work there.
Campus Morning Mail 19 – 22 May 2023
2022
Two years on: The effects of the pandemic on New Zealand’s universities
Back in early 2020, as the pandemic engulfed us, as lockdowns took effect and as the borders closed, there were dire predictions of about the cost to universities – especially the loss of the international students whose fees institutions have come to rely on. So it’s useful to look back and see just how it turned out … as well as to think about what lies in store.
17 July 2022
A recent article in the NZ Herald got me thinking …. What does the evidence tell us about the design of the student allowances scheme? What should we do about allowances? In this post, I give a critique of the views expressed in the Herald article and suggest new directions for addressing problems of equity of access to tertiary education.
23 March 2022
2021
Lifelong learning – the evidence and the responses
A presentation given to the APEC Future Education Forum, held (virtually) in Seoul.
30 September 2021
2020
The coming election – Part 5: NZ First
NZ First released its policies – across all portfolios – just 48 hours before early voting started. It was a smart looking publication. But just how good were the tertiary education elements? was it worth the wait? And in the (increasingly unlikely) event that NZ First is called on when coalition negotiations start, what would they be likely to put on the table?
2 October 2020
The coming election – Part 4: National’s policy
It’s only a few days till early voting starts. But we are still hearing policy announcements. This article – the last in my series on the parties’ policies for tertiary education – comments on what the National Party is offering to voters with an interest in tertiary education.
30 September 2020
The coming election – Part 3: What would Labour do?
Labour has released its policy for the 2020 election. The decision to abandon phases 2 and 3 of the fees-free policy grabbed the headlines. But the policy also contains a couple of apparently small but very important new measures. This post casts a critical eye over the release.
22 September 2020
The coming election – Part 2: the minor parties
Minor parties have the luxury of making bold principles-led policy platforms, confident that they are unlikely to have deal with the messy business of translating them into practice. They leave the heavy lifting to the lead party in a governing coalition. But they can select high-profile issues to lay on the table during coalition talks – issues that are drawn from their principles and that will appeal to their voter base.
This post assesses the 2020 tertiary education election policies of the Green Party and the ACT Party. What are their visions for the system? And what are their issues du jour?
10 September 2020
The 2020 New Zealand election is getting ever closer. What are the parties proposing to those of us in tertiary education? This is the first article in a series of three that looks at what is on offer.
2 September 2020
A double-edged sword – international education market in a time of virus
Is growth in the international education market the price of success in the fight against the virus?
15 August 2020
New Zealand could boost its overseas intake – if only its borders were open …
Our success in the fight against COVID-19 has made New Zealand a more attractive destination for international students, with modelling suggesting that the country’s share of the world market could grow significantly. But will the government’s new “high value/low risk” approach enable us to capture that opportunity?
Times Higher Education, 14 August 2020
How counter-cyclical are university enrolments?
The conventional wisdom has been that university enrolments are less responsive to the economic cycle than enrolments in polytechnics. In this analysis, published in the Times Higher Education, I test that by looking at the effect of the GFC on NZ university enrolments.
Times Higher Education, 17 June 2020
The future of work – and what it means for the tertiary education system
The Productivity Commission’s report on the future of work was published at the start of the Covid-19 lockdown. Perhaps that’s why we have heard so little about it and about what it says about New Zealand’s tertiary education system. But it raises important questions about how well our system is placed to cope with labour market disruption. This report may be about the future of work. But its proposals are vitally important for the future of the tertiary education system.
15 June 2020
Can New Zealand’s universities trade their out of the pandemic crisis?
The universities were quick to tell us how they expect the pandemic will hit their finances. But the minister appeared unimpressed, telling the vice-chancellors to trade their way through the crisis, borrowing if necessary. In this article in the Times Higher Education, I look at the minister’s reasoning and discuss the prospects and risks for the universities.
Times Higher Education 8 June 2020
Vocational education in a time of plague
The fourth post in my series on how the Covid-19 recession is likely to affect tertiary education in New Zealand. This article looks at vocational education. How does vocational education fare in a recession? How will the new RoVE reforms work in the recession? Do they offer protection for our struggling vocational education system?
13 May 2020
Going against the flow – a postscript
My post Going against the flow illustrated the relationship between tertiary enrolments and the unemployment rate. This postscript takes the analysis a little further – it asks how much do enrolments shift in response to changes in the unemployment rate.
10 May 2020
Going against the flow – how does the economic cycle affect tertiary education
What do we know about how the economic cycle affects demand for tertiary education? What types of tertiary education are affected? How strong is the effect? How soon? This paper looks at the evidence from past recessions as we wait for the effects of the coming recession.
5 May 2020
The coming recession
As we wait with trepidation for the arrival of the Covid-19 downturn, it’s time to assess how well the tertiary education system is placed to support young people about to enter the workforce.
28 April 2020
Storm about to hit young workers
The Global Financial Crisis badly hurt the employment prospects of young people about to enter the workforce. Covid-19 will have a deeper impact, and the Government needs to respond better this time.
newsroom.co.nz, 6 April 2020
2019
National’s policy Part 2
The second part of the discussion of the tertiary education aspects of the National party’s education discussion document by looking at the party’s ideas on vocational education and transitions to tertiary.
Education Central, 11 December 2019
National’s policy
The National party has started releasing discussion papers, floating ideas that might end up in next year’s election policy. Or might not, depending on the public’s reaction. Road testing policy ideas is a smart move. What does the discussion document have to say about tertiary education?
Education Central, 5 December 2019
Cutting fees will not improve access
The Labour Party in the UK, like the Democrats in the US, hopes to be elected on a policy of abolishing student fees. The experience of New Zealand challenges the rationale for such a strategy.
Times Higher Education, 28 November 2019
New Zealand’s vice-chancellors are also walking a tightrope over China
Recent clashes over Hong Kong and Tiananmen Square have strained universities’ diplomatic sinews.
Times Higher Education, 10 September 2019
Navigating the complex new vocational education system
Part 3 of the discussion of the Review of Vocational Education (ROVE) looks at the complexities of operating the new system with its many different groups and entities.
Education Central, 18 August 2019
How do we find out about university quality?
Is there any value in ranking universities?
Education Central, 13 August 2019
The creation of the NZIST: the benefits, risks and challenges
Part 2 of the critique of the Review of Vocational Education (ROVE) looking at the Government’s decision to merge New Zealand’s 16 polytechnics into a single national institute.
Education Central, 8 August 2019
External research income
Looking at new data on the PBRF, what do we learn about the commercialisation of university research? And what does it mean for our universities going forward?
Education Central, 3 July 2019
What to make of the ROVE announcements
Yes, change to the vocational education sector is needed, but must it be at the expense of the Industry Training Organisations? This the first of three discussions of the implications of the changes announced last week.
Education Central, 5 August 2019
Hit or miss? The challenge of targeting
The second of the two-part series on the fees-free policy looks at addressing the issue of access to tertiary education.
Education Central, 24 June 2019
Hit or miss? A quick look at the fees-free policy
In the first of a two-part series on the fees-free policy, we crunch the numbers to look at whether the Government got it right or wrong with its fees-free policy.
Education Central, 17 June 2019
What can we learn from the 2018 PBRF results?
An analysis of the data from the 2018 Performance-based Research Fund (PBRF) quality evaluation, yields some interesting observations about the PBRF and its future.
Education Central, 22 May 2019
Research assessment in New Zealand could be marked down
A review following the latest iteration of the PBRF could lead to radical changes that undermine the gains made.
Times Higher Education,14 May 2019
Another university ranking – really?
Not all university ranking systems are created equal.
Education Review,9 April 2019
Getting funding right is key to an effective vocational education system
It took a crisis for New Zealand’s vocational education system to work effectively, with ITPs and ITOs working collaboratively during the rebuild after the Canterbury earthquakes. In order to ensure the two parts of the system work well together going forward, it is essential to have a new funding system that recognises all the elements of vocational education.
Education Central, 20 February 2019
Fijian higher education: a small system in a big hurry
The Pacific nation’s ambitions to harness its universities to drive economic growth face many challenges.
Times Higher Education,24 January 2019
2018
New Zealand study highlights what matters for HE access and success
A landmark analysis of several government data sets will help policymakers make more effective interventions.
Times Higher Education,11 October 2018
We need to talk about … life-long learning
Micro-credentials help resolve the emerging need for training but questions remain about how the government is going to effectively fund life-long learning
Education Review,6 August 2018
New Zealand’s to-undo list is good politics but questionable policy
Appealing to students and their families made electoral sense for the Labour Party, but its promises have saddled it with a lot of low-value spending
Times Higher Education, 28 June 2018
Is the grass really so much greener across the Tasman?
How does New Zealand’s tertiary education system stacks up compared to Australia’s? Do our students really get a raw deal compared to their Aussie counterparts?
Education Review, 13 April 2018
What can university rankings tell us about our universities — or: How stratified is our university system?
If we can’t (and shouldn’t) ignore international university rankings, what can we learn from them.
Education Central, 28 February 2018
Does it really matter where you study?
Does it matter what you study or where you study? We look at the data for answers.
Education Central, 12 February 2018
Straight from degree to domicile? There is no stampede from study to permanent residence
Times Higher Education,1 February 2018
2017
Too soon to declare qualifications dead
A discussion of recent suggestions that qualifications are getting close to their use-by date.
Education Central, 4 December 2017
How the new government will transform tertiary education
Interesting changes for New Zealand’s tertiary education system under a Labour-NZ First government.
Education Central, 25 October 2017
New Zealand’s new Labour-led government likely to abolish fees
Times Higher Education,19 October 2017
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Strategy, Policy, Analysis | Tertiary Education 