Vice-chancellors’ group warns NZ parliamentary committee about effects of stagnating funding for research students
A parliamentary committee in New Zealand has heard that stagnating public funding for university stipends is skewing the profile of the early career research workforce and reducing the number who can be supported.
In a briefing session conducted by the Education and Workforce Committee on 5 April, Universities New Zealand chief executive Chris Whelan said that “New Zealand’s postgraduate workforce no longer looks like the rest of New Zealand”, partly because of inadequate stipends.
“Huge numbers of students are only able to study because they can pay their [own] way through university,” he said. Universities “can’t get sufficient support to be able to grow the number of students able to get those qualifications”.
Greens parliamentarian Chlöe Swarbrick asked Whelan what impact it would have if postgraduate student allowances, which were removed in 2013, were reintroduced.
“I think there’s a lot of students who have to work out how they pay for things,” particularly with the rising cost of living, Whelan said. Some students were asking whether they could afford “another three, four, five years of postgraduate study”. Many had to “simply choose to work”, he said.
“Unless we can get financial support around them…it becomes an impediment to them being able to go on,” Whelan said. “If you can’t pay for it, you can’t do it.”
A written submission from the vice-chancellors’ group said that “students from traditionally poorly served backgrounds (especially Māori and Pacific students) are often the first to lose access due to financial constraints”.
Reduced numbers
Levels of support from the Performance-Based Research Fund, which is a key source of university research funding, have not increased since 2017-18, and “we’ve given advice to government that it’s the one fund that exists to be able to support the development of research within university systems. It’s the only fund that’s able to support young academics as they get the profile,” Whelan told the committee.
“We very much see it as the fund that’s used to develop and support our younger academic staff.”
The Performance-Based Research Fund is used to pay for stipends, but it is being “pulled in different directions” with the need to use it to pay for equipment, libraries and other costs, Whelan said.
“In the five years, inflation has moved a huge distance,” he said, adding that universities are responding by offering support to fewer postgraduate research students.
“Almost every dean of graduate studies I talked to said the same thing. They were all putting up stipends this year…but in every case they were having to reduce the number of stipends they were offering. It’s a finite pool of money. It’s just tragic that there are fewer doctoral students that we are able to support.”
He said Universities New Zealand would continue to pursue the issue “loudly, to anyone who will listen”.
Ellen Dixon, national president of the New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations, told the hearing that “postgraduate stipends have not covered living costs for many years”. She said that over recent years, they had fallen below minimum wage. She acknowledged that some funding streams, such as the Marsden Fund, had increased their payments.