The FINANCIAL — The University of Auckland's tuition fees for domestic students will rise by 4 percent for 2013.
The University’s Council approved the fee increases today for undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Fees for international students for 2014 will increase by 3.3 percent. International fees are set a year ahead to give students from overseas plenty of notice of the costs they will likely incur.
The increases were regrettable but necessary given government funding constraints and the increased costs of running a university of international quality, the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Stuart McCutcheon said.
The University’s costs will increase by an estimated 3.7 percent in 2013 over the present year. As the University of Auckland reported, this cost increase comes about from general cost increases in items purchased by the University such as utilities, research and teaching supplies but particularly from increases in people costs, which make up 62 percent of the University’s total costs.
“We operate in a competitive international market for staff and to my knowledge no-one is arguing that our salaries or costs are too high," Professor McCutcheon said.
Professor McCutcheon said that despite this the government is increasing the tuition subsidy by an average of just 1.2 percent leaving a considerable shortfall for universities.
“Ideally we would wish to keep fees down but the reality is that even the 4 percent increase for domestic students will leave us with $6.6m of costs that cannot be recovered from either government funding or students. That represents over 60 staff positions that cannot be funded next year. This is in addition to a similar and cumulative shortfall in each of the recent years.
“Had neither domestic not international fees been increased, the shortfall would have been about $15.5m or over 150 unfunded positions. Such an outcome would simply not have been sustainable for the University, no matter how desirable it might have been for current and future students.”
Professor McCutcheon noted that New Zealand universities had the lowest income and expenditure per student in the developed world, and that the rankings of our universities were falling. This was evidence, as if it were needed, that a country cannot have low fees, low government investment and a high quality system at the same time. “We need to address this problem if we want to have a genuinely world class university system," he said.
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