More foreign students and more NZ universities to expand overseas - Joyce

Watch the interview here

The Government wants more foreign students and more NZ universities to expand overseas.

Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce told TV One’s Q+A programme that he wants more NZ universities to expand overseas to boost their income.

“More international income, that’s right because some of it can be done offshore. The Australians are pretty good at actually delivering offshore. Take Singapore for example, there's a number of Australian universities that deliver in Singapore in partnership.

“Because that’s all part of New Zealand's internationalisation. Broaden it out from tertiary education for a second. Over the next 40 years South East Asia is hugely important to us. If you go to Singapore all the Australian universities and research institutions are present in Singapore. New Zealand it's literally Massey are the only ones there doing food technology.”

He said universities also need to focus on attracting more foreign students:

“We have to keep bringing in international students because that’s part of the modern university life. You say look at some of these big Australian universities, quite significant proportions of their income are in the international sphere, and that means they can afford the higher priced academics”

RAW DATA: TVNZ's Q+A transcript: Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce

SUSAN Tomorrow Labour Day commemorates the battle for the 8 hour working day, New Zealand workers first celebrated that right back in 1890.  Those workers though would barely  recognise the workplace as it is today, so many jobs have disappeared, many new ones have evolved and globalisation's opened up a highly competitive market for skilled workers.  It's also created a competitive market for our own universities who are desperate to attract the best and the brightest students.  Corin's with the Minister in charge of Tertiary Education, Steven Joyce.

CORIN Steven Joyce thank you for joining us.  If we could start with the rankings, so all of our universities are slipping in those international rankings.  Does that matter?

STEVEN JOYCE – Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment Minister

Well a couple of things, firstly this is a mixed story, Auckland's pretty steady.  It's gone up and down a little bit in the last couple of years.  There's four rankings, and there's about to be a 5th one next week, so you can choose your ranking system.  But I think certainly some of the universities outside Auckland and Otago particularly are dropping a bit and that is challenging.

CORIN Is it a worry?  I mean do you make that a priority something you need to address or do you say that’s out of our control.

STEVEN Well I think you do need to give it some thought but two things first in terms of the rankings.  They are very subjective and for example some of them do ratings of what companies think of universities around the world, and of course a lot more companies in Europe and the US are focused on these things than New Zealand, and so just the size of New Zealand and our location makes it a bit harder and some of the other things they measure, for example one of them measures the number of Nobel Prize winners or Field Medal winners at each university, and they’ve made that 20% of the score.  Well in New Zealand's case we don’t have any currently in any of our universities, so that 20% we're out.  So you’ve got to take it with a certain grain of salt.

CORIN Does it really matter though…

STEVEN It is important.

CORIN Because if you're attracting foreign students then they're looking at those rankings.

STEVEN Well to some degree they are, it's not the whole answer but the point is, do we have to focus on it a bit, the answer is yes.  In fact the New Zealand University scores are steadily increasing, but what's happening is we're getting more competition from particularly universities in emerging markets so more and more of them have developed over the last 20-30 years and in particular the last five or six years are really seeing themselves grow, and it is a competitive world and New Zealand universities …

CORIN Will you commit over the next three years to try to turn around that trend of us sort of getting overtaken if you like in the rankings?

STEVEN Well it's an important part of our tertiary education strategy, we aim at improving the strength of our research link to universities.  So yes it is an important thing to do, but whether you can actually improve the rankings or maintain the rankings it's important to note New Zealand universities are in the top 3% in the world right now, all of them.

CORIN I'll pick this up because Treasury when you asked for some more money at the last budget they said that we shouldn’t be worrying about the rankings too much and that it shouldn’t be a priority and that in fact there was no need for more money.

STEVEN Well Treasury as we know have a number of ways of saying the same thing, and yeah they're not big fans of it, but look I think the important thing is accountability.  So let's have a look at the university sector in New Zealand, how's it going?  It's going pretty well, we want to have obviously well trained students.  We want to get the best possible for our kids, that’s going pretty well, except that you know we've got to look out into the future.  So how international are our universities?  How do they rank compared to other universities is important and we have to keep focusing on that, and also we have to keep bringing in international students because that’s part of the modern university life.  You say look at some of these big Australian universities, quite significant proportions of their income are in the international sphere, and that means they can afford the higher priced academics that some of our universities…

CORIN I'll get to that because is going after foreign students, is that you not then having to worry about funding these universities with more money?

STEVEN No, it's looking actually – we are funding the universities with more money.

CORIN Well it's targeted though isn't it?

STEVEN No, the University of Auckland funding from Government has gone up 24% since 2008 just for the University of Auckland alone.  

CORIN Well why did the Vice Chancellor say that their baseline funding is not keeping up with the inflation rate?  Across the board.

STEVEN Well I think that’s the difficulty for Auckland is actually they have done pretty well despite the GFC, but they definitely see themselves as an "elite" university that they should be doing better in the funding than everybody else.  I happen to have a slightly different view, I actually think they do do well.  But it would be a mistake to push more money to Auckland at the expense of some of the other universities.

CORIN But isn't it the problem here, either you're going to have to let universities like Auckland increase their fees by more than 4% or you're going to have to give them more money or we're not going to get up those rankings or stay in that top 200.

STEVEN No, I don’t think that’s right, because actually let's go back to the money, you asked about the international income.  So Auckland University's income has gone up 24% in the last five years from government, and 25% from other sources.  If you look at Auckland the biggest gap in their income is in fact their international income.  If you're comparing them with say New South Wales or Queensland and those universities each collect about 300 million dollars a year from international income, Auckland collects about 90 million a year from international income.  In other respects they're quite similar.  So if you look at that you say well there's no way the government is going to pony up for the other 210 million dollars a year.  Auckland does have to get a bit more focused on international income if it wants to compete with those universities which I think is where it should be going.

CORIN You really are pushing that message aren't you, that all universities have to get more foreign students.

STEVEN More international income, that’s right because some of it can be done offshore.  The Australians are pretty good at actually delivering offshore.  Take Singapore for example, there's a number of Australian universities that deliver in Singapore in partnership…

CORIN You want New Zealand universities in foreign countries?

STEVEN Absolutely why not?  Because that’s all part of New Zealand's internationalisation.  Broaden it out from tertiary education for a second.  Over the next 40 years South East Asia is hugely important to us.  If you go to Singapore all the Australian universities and research institutions are present in Singapore.  New Zealand it's literally Massey are the only ones there doing food technology…

CORIN Will you be funding, pushing universities to spread their wings..

STEVEN We do, we do fund in terms of Education New Zealand, quite a significant investment there, new entity which helps with that, it's like 40 million dollars a year.  We do fund things like Asian scholarships, but 

actually universities say Auckland, it's a billion dollars a year turnover nearly, so they can do it themselves.

CORIN All this focused on foreign students, does that become a detriment of Kiwi students into what they are learning?

STEVEN No, because it's not the only focus at all.  We've got a number of things that we're working on, that’s just one of the ones that the critics pick on a bit, but actually it's just one.  That’s important.  But the other reason it's important before we get off it, is that New Zealand's future is in an international world, and we've seen that in the last five or six years.  You know China basically helped us through the GFC.  Over the next 10 or 15 years it's going to be South East Asia and South America.  So those international linkages, are not just for the benefit of our universities.  The benefit of our whole society and our economy is to have those international linkages.  We have 25,000 Chinese study here each year, most of them go home and end up ambassadors for New Zealand.

CORIN We've got to move on.  Let's get on to the subjects.  You put a lot of effort into engineering and to science, into ICT, because that’s where you clearly see the skill shortages.  You’ve had a fair few years to get that right, but you're having to go to Australia for job fairs.  It's not working is it?  I mean you’ve got skill shortages that aren't being filled.

STEVEN Well hang on.  I became the Minister in 2010 and let's face it at 2010 something I can't remember the exact number, so 80 or 90% of people who are in the New Zealand workforce are already there, you know they're going to be there for the next 20 or 30 years.  That’s the nature of workforces.

CORIN That’s still four years.

STEVEN Well we have, we've made some big investments there, but we need more.  Take ICT for example, we're up about 20-25% of people studying ICT at our universities, but these companies are growing flat out now, I mean the Zeros and the Venns and all those companies in the world around New Zealand, great story, they're growing very very quickly, and there's no way in a million years that they're going to pick up experienced programmers off the shelf for the numbers that they need, and so they are going to have to bring people back.  Australasia is a labour market where we have donated labour to Australia for a period of time.  Now it's time to pull people back.  But you still come back to the wider question of which subjects to study.  New Zealand universities have been you know traditionally strong in social sciences, humanities, and management, weak in physical sciences and engineering.  You actually see that in the rankings, and so…

CORIN And you're trying to change that aren't you?

STEVEN Yes, it's a big job though, it’s a 10 or 15 years job to really lift …

CORIN So tell me what you want it to look like in 10 or 15 years, will there be a substantial reduction in the number of humanity students.

STEVEN No what I want to see is a substantial lift in the number of engineering, ICT and physical science students, and I want to see the subject rankings for those, that people look around the world and they look at New Zealand and they see New Zealand in engineering and they see it as strong …

CORIN So if you're a Professor of Philosophy should you be worried about your long term prospects?

STEVEN No, because it's not an either/or.  I mean you do need the social sciences.  What we actually need is a bigger investment in the areas that New Zealand companies have.  So what I'm doing is not dropping the funding for the others, but it has been kept steady, and the funding for engineering and ICT is going up, so it needs new ICT grad schools, another 40 million for engineering, and the related subjects like …

CORIN So the money's all going to those subjects right, but the money's not going into the other subjects, so they're going to be squeezed, they're not going to get the quality teachers and eventually those courses are going to become less attractive. 

STEVEN  No what it will mean, and this is actually happening.  To a degree on one level we're leading, in the other area we're following.   So since the Global Financial Crisis a lot of young people have decided they want to be in those sort of subjects as against previously they might have done humanities or social sciences, and that’s actually being led by the students.  So we will see change…

CORIN Is it being led by the students?  I mean we heard Dame Anne Salmond I think she fired a broadside at you saying that you're effectively arrogant trying to determine what students would want to study.

STEVEN No that’s arrogant with the greatest respect, because actually we do, we have decided for 30-40 years what the students study because we fund at different levels according to different disciplines.  So all we're doing is actually shifting the boundary.  So in actual fact New Zealand actually produces a number of engineers at roughly half the OECD average.  Roughly half at the moment.  And so we're just saying well actually we need to balance that up a little bit if our companies are going to have the sort of engineers, domestically produced that can actually … I don’t buy into this you're for or anti one or the other, and I also don’t buy into I'm pushing it in a way that’s never been pushed before, it's just that it was previously pushed very much in a liberal arts area and now we're just balancing out.

CORIN Can I ask you about a comment that Andrew Little's been making on his campaign trail about the future of work, saying that it's the biggest issue facing middle New Zealanders, the future of work.  Jobs we take for granted now won’t be here in 10 years' time, do you agree with him on that?

STEVEN I think some jobs are going, but actually it's been going on for some time.  We're getting more and more higher skill jobs.

CORIN Well what do you say to the parents of those teenagers who are starting to enter in that phase, who may be going to university or polytech.  What should they be thinking, should they be being pushed into something.

STEVEN No they should do things that they're passionate about, but the good thing is that most teenagers are passionate about a number of things.  So I would encourage them to look pretty closely at the career prospects of the thing that they're going to be studying at university and we have these things now….

CORIN So are you saying you don’t think that they should just go to university because they can't think of anything else to do?

STEVEN A degree is a good thing.  I did a degree in Zoology right, and I've never used my zoology degree in a professional capacity except potentially at parliament, and that’s the reality of it, but I did learn how to learn at university.  So no you can't simply say just do an engineering degree or just do this degree because actually any degree teaches you a whole lot of skills you otherwise wouldn’t have.  So what I would say to parents these days is firstly get your kids to go as far as they can in their education, because the world is getting a more competitive place.  So do encourage them to take every opportunity they can, then get them to study something they're passionate about but do it with an eye to what's possible for their future and what's the sort of areas that they might want to earn an income out, just a bit more about that as well as your passion.  If you do that they’ll be fine.

CORIN And just finally what about those in the profession, should they be worried again about if they're not in one of those subjects that you’ve identified as crucial, the engineering or ICT?

STEVEN No I don’t think so because what's happening is we're seeing a steady rise in semi-skilled jobs but not the sort that in years gone by, what we are seeing is a big rise in highly skilled jobs, and that’s coming out through all these world economic changes, the rise of emerging countries and so on.  So what you would want to do is make sure you do as I say take every opportunity you can to build your career.  Because don’t forget we're talking about the next 40 or 50 years.  I reckon we need our kids to have more international experience to have more of an eye on what's exciting.  Well we've got all these new companies coming along that need smart clever kids in areas in engineering and sciences and so on.  There's lots of opportunity, all we need to do is make sure we just keep our heads up, look at the horizon and say well that’s something I want to do.

CORIN Steven Joyce thank you very much for your time on Q+A.