Residency barriers must be lowered
OPINION: The international education sector has been one of the last cabs off the rank in the Covid recovery.
In recent weeks though, the Government has finally begun to put some promotional muscle behind promoting New Zealand as a study destination. Not before time. Our main competitors launched their efforts to woo back foreign students almost a year ago.
To be fair, visa processing delays continue to dog our major rivals – Canada and Australia – as well, but Immigration New Zealand has turned visa holdups into an artform. Last year, for example, the Government announced a residency path for up to 165,000 foreign applicants who could meet the eligibility criteria and arbitrary timelines involved. (Foreign students still completing their PhDs at the deadline were shut out of the quota.) As of late July, Immigration NZ had managed to process fewer than half the applications received.
Clearly, any skilled talent looking to make a home in New Zealand has needed to have limitless patience. Some have got tired of waiting, and have left for more welcoming shores.
Reportedly, the departees have included sizeable numbers of the skilled nurses desperately needed within our public health system.
In almost every visa category, the mismatch between visa demand and processing capacity has become chronic.
Only last week, Immigration NZ conceded that demand for visitor visas was running about three times higher than expected, when the border reopened. Somewhat ominously, Immigration NZ added that its new visa processing platform ‘‘continues to bed in’’.
All that aside, the pandemic remains the main reason why an international education sector that used to pump $5 billion annually into the economy has been decimated. New Zealand educational institutions have lost more than $1 billion in lost fees from the reduced student numbers. Given the reductions in fee paying students, layoffs at tertiary institutions are now in train, with Auckland University of Technology planning to cut 150 academic staff and 80 general staff before year’s end.
Meanwhile, the delivery platforms for international education continue to change dramatically. The pandemic has brought major developments in the use of e-classrooms, virtual reality tools, distance learning hubs and the like. Increasingly, many Asian countries ( including China) are now competing for foreign students themselves when previously, they had been willing to send their students over here.
Despite this fierce global competition for scarce talent, New Zealand has chosen to put itself at a disadvantage through its reluctance to treat tertiary study as a pathway to residency. Canada and Australia have had no such qualms. Australia actively markets itself through its Global Talent Visa programme as a place where graduates in prize disciplines can confidently treat Australia as a home for themselves and their families.
We are not doing likewise.
Apparently, New Zealand still believes that its lifestyle, landscapes and relative safety will continue to be sufficient drawcards for foreign students. Such complacency would be misguided. Word is getting around that New Zealand is a low wage economy, but one with high costs for food, housing and transport.
In sum, we will need to lower our residency barriers if we aim to attract foreign students in the disciplines required to drive our economic growth.