Hi everyone, welcome back to the final stretch of
2009. I hope you all had a great break and that a few of you got the
chance to head down to the mountain for some skiing or snowboarding.
AuSM has a whole lot in store for you for the last 2 months of
semester, so make sure you keep an eye and ear out to ensure you
don't miss out.
To a more serious note, unfortunately a
matter of great importance has arisen while you were away which I
feel I should dedicate this column to. Last month AUT released its
schedule for the 2009 International Student Fees. Shockingly the
university has substantially increased fees for new international
students, some by as much as 23%. What is more alarming is the fact
that AUT's well known and established "grand parenting scheme"
has been REVOKED.
To give you some background knowledge
the AUT grand parenting scheme was established so that international
students who came to AUT to study would only have to pay the same fee
for the period of their qualification. The AUT "grand parenting"
scheme had been in place for several decades and made AUT to stand
out from all the other universities throughout New Zealand.
Now the university has decided that
from 2009 NEW international students will have their fees increased
by 5% annually. This may not appear to be much at first, however when
you consider the fact that international students pay somewhere in
the region of between $16,000 and $24,000 annually this is a
significant amount of money. Take a 4 year engineering degree and a
typical international student has a bill of around $100,000 to pay on
top of their costs of living.
What is worse is that a huge number of
our fellow international students come to New Zealand in search of a
better education which they may not be able to receive back at home.
Some families spend their life time putting away enough money just so
that their child can get a decent education. Unfortunately AUT is no
different to any of the other universities in New Zealand and around
the world, and simply see international students as "cash cows"
who they can exploit for their money.
To all you domestic students who are
reading this column and are maybe thinking, well that is bad but how
is this going to effective me? Well, let me tell you how. The fact is
that currently tuition fees for domestic AUT students is around $4000
annually (give or take a few hundred dollars), and under the current
Labour government a policy known "fee maxima" is in place that
only allows universities to increase your fees by a maximum of 5%
annually. Should the National Party get in to power and revoke this
policy next year and repeat their actions of the 1990's (whereby
they allowed universities to increase fees by whatever they wanted,
which was around 180% on average between 1992 and 1999) you may well
see your fees drastically increased in a very short amount of time.
If AUT can do this to international students there is no reason why
they will not do it to domestic students, given the opportunity.
On that note, I will leave you all to
think about the future of New Zealand......
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