Skills crisis: Minister's threat to uni on funding

Auckland University and the Government appear headed for a showdown over what courses the university is offering - and what the country needs.

Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce is threatening to force the university to take more engineering students, even though the university says this could cause layoffs elsewhere on the campus.

This year's Budget put an extra $42 million into engineering and $17 million into science at universities and polytechnics - while freezing funding for all other subjects - in a bid to ease skill shortages in fields such as engineering and computing.

But Auckland University vice-chancellor Stuart McCutcheon said the increase was paid as a bulk fund, and the university did not have to put it all into engineering and science.

"If we followed that, we would have increased the budgets of those faculties and made large numbers of people in the arts, creative arts, the business school and the law school redundant," he said.

"The other thing to remember is that the programmes people want to increase are generally the most expensive programmes, so to have more engineering students you may have to reduce the number of arts students by twice as many.

"It's not driven only by the needs of industry. It [the Government] wants higher participation rates for Maori and Pacific students, but Maori and Pacific students typically go into arts and education rather than engineering, so if you shift the balance you have impacts on your equity objectives. All that makes it quite a complex picture."

- Nzherald.co.nz