Universities New Zealand downsized amid funding pressures

The representative body for New Zealand’s eight universities is being scaled back as funding pressures force administrators to rely on their in-house advocacy and analysis capabilities.

In a transition starting on 13 April and expected to take up to a year, Universities New Zealand (UNZ) will morph from a “quasi-independent peak body” to a secretariat for the New Zealand Vice-Chancellors’ Committee (NZVCC) and its standing committees.

The 14-strong team will be reduced by between a third and a half, beginning with the immediate departure of respected chief executive Chris Whelan, as universities’ policy specialists assume responsibility for subject matter expertise currently supplied by UNZ staff.

UNZ chair Neil Quigley said the changes had been precipitated by the expiry of a 4 per cent Covid funding lifeline and a widening gap between student demand and available teaching subsidies. “We’ve really had to take a hard look at…those functions which have been added to UNZ over the past 15 years,” he said.

“There wouldn’t be much that UNZ has done in the past that we’re now just not going to do at all, but we will be doing it rather differently.”

Quigley said whoever held the revolving position of UNZ chair would probably need to be more “proactive” in “trying to influence the direction of government policy”. He said that with just eight universities, and “only one powerful level of government” to deal with, New Zealand’s sector arguably had less need for an advocacy body than its counterparts in the UK and Australia.

“We don’t agree on everything, but [a] group [of] only eight vice-chancellors…can be reasonably cohesive around any issue where we sensibly have a common position. There are some issues where we don’t have common positions, but where there’s sense in having a common position, usually we manage to have one without too much difficulty.”

He said the change was largely about reducing “duplication” in the capabilities of UNZ and its member universities. Where necessary, vice-chancellors would “use more external contracting” to help them advocate in areas where their staff may have insufficient expertise, such as immigration.

UNZ will continue meeting its statutory obligations to manage several undergraduate and postgraduate scholarship programmes, monitor compliance with New Zealand’s pastoral care code and vouchsafe the quality of university degrees. The last function has been in flux since 2024, when the Academic Quality Agency (AQA) – an independent arm of UNZ that audited university programmes – was wound down over cost pressures.

Its replacement, the newly established Universities Quality Assurance Agency, will continue undertaking periodic audits of the eight universities. Quigley said they would focus on learning and employment outcomes and the effectiveness of universities’ internal quality assurance mechanisms.

“Under the old AQA regime, the reviews had become much more thematic,” he said. “They generated a lot of words, but they weren’t all that helpful in terms of just being clear about quality.”

New Zealand universities will also have power to accredit their own programmes, replacing a decades-old system where courses must be greenlighted by the Committee on University Academic Programmes (CUAP), which has representatives from all eight universities. “Basically, you need the approval of the other seven universities before you can offer something,” Quigley said. The Wellington government had pressed for this arrangement to be changed to enable universities “to come up with different models of what should constitute a degree and what would benefit learners and employers”.

CUAP approval “may have been a handbrake on innovation”, Quigley said. “We won’t know until we give something else a try.”

He said the biggest handbrake was a lack of funding. “Government wants universities to be doing the things that are attractive to students and employers and growing our numbers. It is challenging when they then can’t afford to fund those places.”

Quigley said about 12 per cent of domestic students at his University of Waikato were unsubsidised, with the costs of educating them covered only by tuition fees – normally 40 per cent or less of per-student funding.