Our Views - The Role of Private Tertiary Education

Private tertiary education makes a contribution in almost every sector of New Zealand's economy and community and has done so for over 150 years. Their role is simply to serve the needs of students, employers, community groups and the wider public.

PTEs developed rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s, shifting from 1-2% of enrolments to 10-15% of enrolments. Many PTEs developed into large, multi-site organisations meeting mainstream education. ITI's members were at the front of that charge, matching high growth with excellent student outcomes.

Many ITI members operate on a similar or larger scale than the public sector in their specialist area, so while they do not have the corporate overheads of a polytechnic, they have more focus on their specialist area.

The government's Statement of Tertiary Education Priorities states that the role of PTEs is to offer niche education and training that augments or complements the provision of the public providers'. The government has limited the PTE sector, first implementing a moratorium on new courses or sites, and then replacing it with caps on enrolments. The government has also set tougher standards for the private sector than for the public sector. PTEs have to justify the quality and relevance of every qualification over 2005-07 if they wish to retain their funding, while public providers only face the same rigour for a few courses.

ITI wants to ensure that when our members demonstrate their quality and relevance, they have a chance to grow on the same basis as any other organisation. With every PTE qualification being checked for quality and relevance over 2005-07, the successful providers expect a fair hearing from the government.

By supporting the role of the private sector, New Zealand will benefit from the innovation that diverse providers can produce. While economies of scale are important in some subjects (such as medicine), the value delivered by diversity more than offsets the smaller size of some ITI members. They will continue to focus on innovation and excellence in tertiary education well into the future.

The TEC Giveth and the Minister Taketh Away
December 2006

Last newsletter, we wrote about the positive draft definition of the distinctive contribution of private training establishments (PTEs). Apparently some officials started asking around about whether we had seen the final version yet, and now we understand their confusion.

The draft definition distributed by the TEC was generally supported by ITI, with a few issues that we raised in our November newsletter. The final version approved by the Minister of Tertiary Education, was much less satisfactory, but we will leave a detailed response until 2007.

The PTE sector is, however, still in a better position than in April, when Cabinet had not been given any information at all about PTEs. In the intervening months there have been good discussions with politicians and officials, and PTEs do have a larger space in which to operate. ITPs, of course, have a much bigger space in which to operate, but it is performance, not politics, that tends to have the greatest long-term effect. Given that another ITP has just been taken over by a Minister and been given extra crisis financing, ITI members will continue to focus on results for students, employers and the community.