Mythbusters!

It's time to bust some common myths about universities and graduates.

Myth: An arts degree is worthless

A university arts graduate will earn around $1.25m more over their working life than someone with just a school-level qualification. University bachelor's degree graduates also have high employment rates with less than 3% receiving an unemployment benefit and around 90% are estimated to be working in degree-relevant roles.

http://www.universitiesnz.ac.nz/latest-news-and-publications/degree-smart-investment

Myth: Entrepreneurs are uni drop outs

The annual Startup economy report found more than four in five startup founders in Australia have a university education. The top skills for founders were strongly linked to professional university-level skills, including software development (49%), general business operations (57%), marketing (32%), data science (16%), scientific research (12%), and legal skills (11%).New research powerfully refutes the myth that entrepreneurs are mostly people who either never went to university – or dropped out during their studies.

Startups contribute more than $160 billion to the Australian economy and this is projected to grow.

Universities Australia’s startup economy report can be found here

Myth: New Zealand spends just as much on tertiary education as most other OECD countries

While New Zealand spends a relatively high proportion of GDP on tertiary education overall, as much as half of this expenditure goes directly to students, for example to student loans, scholarships and grants - not to the organisations for teaching and learning.

As highlighted by the Ministry of Education, “Student loans in New Zealand play an important part of the public expenditure on tertiary education. When we exclude the public subsidies to households, which include student loans, scholarships and grants, New Zealand's public expenditure on tertiary education as a percentage of GDP (0.9%) was below OECD average (1.1%).” [1]

Link to most recent data: OECD Education at a Glance 2017 p 189 http://www.oecd.org/edu/education-at-a-glance-19991487.htm
See also: "How does funding stack up against the OECD?"

Myth: Most of New Zealand universities’ money comes from government

• In 2016, less than half (48.5%) of universities’ income came from Government.
• 29.2% came from students through tuition and other student fees
• 22.3% came from other sources. e.g. for research, and from commercialisation and other activities.

The Minister of Education caps any increases to domestic student fees through the Annual Maximum Fee Movement (AMFM). A maximum increase of 2% has been set by the Government for 2018.

Universities are expected to be financially viable, and generate small surpluses of around 3% on an ongoing basis, and to be sustainable in the long term e.g. by maintaining assets, protecting capabilities and capacity, etc.