Last week Newsroom’s Sam Sachdeva covered the political ruckus.
Among the concerns: the free-trade agreement puts no numerical limits on the number of Indian students who could take up student visas. It ensures that students from India can work at least 20 hours per week, within current visas allowing up to 25 hours. The agreement summaries indicate post-study work rights of two to four years for students from India graduating with specific degrees. It also prevents this government and future ones from setting caps that target India specifically.
New Zealand First argued that, “the proposals around the work rights for Indian students, both when they study and after they graduate, would constrain the ability of future governments to make policy changes in response to changing labour market conditions.”
They have other concerns about the deal, but let’s stick with the student visa category; it’s the one that I’m most familiar with.
If you want to apply for and enter New Zealand on a student visa, you must have an offer of place from an approved education provider: a Polytech, a private tertiary education provider, or a university.
You’ll also have to demonstrate that you can cover your tuition fees and living expenses for your first year of study and have a credible plan for later years, are in good health and of good character, and have medical and travel insurance – among other requirements.
Those rules apply to everyone, regardless of their country of origin.
New Zealand would not have any surge in students from India or from anywhere else, regardless of free-trade agreements, unless there were schools offering them places to study.
That isn’t to say that there can’t be problems. There have been before, when some private training establishments seemed to be more visa scam than training provider.
But if New Zealand authorises dodgy training establishments to accept foreign students, that isn’t a ‘students from India’ problem. It’s a New Zealand certification problem. The solution to it would never be to ban or limit the number of students from one country or another. The solution instead would be to tighten up the criteria around institutions authorised to take foreign students.
In fact, those settings have already been tightened.
Since 2022, schools offering places to foreign students must have signed up to a new Code of Practice 2021. The New Zealand Qualifications Authority keeps a list of signatories. If the institution that has offered you a place is not on that list, you cannot use it as basis for a visa application.
The institution offering the place to someone seeking a fee-paying student visa must also provide a signed declaration that the course they’re offering is “appropriate to [the student’s] expectations” and that the student has the “English language ability and academic capability to pass the course.”
If you’re applying to extend your visa, you’ll have to show that you’re passing your course and meeting attendance requirements.
It is always worth being vigilant around these, checking that schools are living up to their side of the deal. But if they aren’t, that’s a local policing problem, not a free-trade-deal problem. If you tried to solve the problem by restricting the number of visas offered to students from India, dodgy schools could simply market themselves elsewhere.
The Agreement also ensures that Indian students graduating with at least a bachelor’s degree can work for two years, or four years for a doctorate. New Zealand already has a Post Study Work Visa allowing stays of up to three years. So it’s slightly longer than the current visa, but not different in kind.
That visa solves a real problem. Graduates eligible to apply for a skilled migrant visa if they had a job offer in hand may not be able to secure that offer if their visas are soon to expire. The post-study visa bridges the gap without providing a guarantee of a longer visa at the end of it.
The free-trade agreement would seem to constrain future governments against reducing the work rights attached to the post-study visa – or at least as it applies to students from India.
But again, that visa is of limited time duration. And requires successful completion of at least a bachelor’s degree. If the skills provided in a bachelor’s degree are valuable enough to warrant heavy subsidisation by the New Zealand government for domestic students*, it hardly seems to make sense to kick people out on having completed that degree.
If some bachelor’s degrees appear very low value, is that really a problem with the free-trade agreement? Or is it a more general problem – and a far worse one – when we consider the prospects for domestic students taking those courses?
As Covid border restrictions eased, my colleague Dr Michael Johnston suggested a different approach. The government could do away with post-study visas and instead accredit specific tertiary study programmes as fast-tracks to residence. Maintaining accreditation would require demonstrating that graduates secure appropriate employment. Domestic students might also benefit from knowing which programmes are accredited, and which are not.
There are always potential problems in student visa settings, and in accreditation of schools authorised to take on foreign students. And it is always worth watching that those settings are right. But none of those problems would be reasonably solved by targeting students from India or any other country.
Problem diagnosis matters.
** Remember that, according to Universities NZ, domestic fees amount to about 18% of university revenues and government tuition funding makes up about 33%. And that the domestic fees paid by students are themselves heavily government-subsidised through interest-free student loans.
Dr Eric Crampton is Chief Economist at the New Zealand Initiative. This article was first published HERE
New Zealand First argued that, “the proposals around the work rights for Indian students, both when they study and after they graduate, would constrain the ability of future governments to make policy changes in response to changing labour market conditions.”
They have other concerns about the deal, but let’s stick with the student visa category; it’s the one that I’m most familiar with.
If you want to apply for and enter New Zealand on a student visa, you must have an offer of place from an approved education provider: a Polytech, a private tertiary education provider, or a university.
You’ll also have to demonstrate that you can cover your tuition fees and living expenses for your first year of study and have a credible plan for later years, are in good health and of good character, and have medical and travel insurance – among other requirements.
Those rules apply to everyone, regardless of their country of origin.
New Zealand would not have any surge in students from India or from anywhere else, regardless of free-trade agreements, unless there were schools offering them places to study.
That isn’t to say that there can’t be problems. There have been before, when some private training establishments seemed to be more visa scam than training provider.
But if New Zealand authorises dodgy training establishments to accept foreign students, that isn’t a ‘students from India’ problem. It’s a New Zealand certification problem. The solution to it would never be to ban or limit the number of students from one country or another. The solution instead would be to tighten up the criteria around institutions authorised to take foreign students.
In fact, those settings have already been tightened.
Since 2022, schools offering places to foreign students must have signed up to a new Code of Practice 2021. The New Zealand Qualifications Authority keeps a list of signatories. If the institution that has offered you a place is not on that list, you cannot use it as basis for a visa application.
The institution offering the place to someone seeking a fee-paying student visa must also provide a signed declaration that the course they’re offering is “appropriate to [the student’s] expectations” and that the student has the “English language ability and academic capability to pass the course.”
If you’re applying to extend your visa, you’ll have to show that you’re passing your course and meeting attendance requirements.
It is always worth being vigilant around these, checking that schools are living up to their side of the deal. But if they aren’t, that’s a local policing problem, not a free-trade-deal problem. If you tried to solve the problem by restricting the number of visas offered to students from India, dodgy schools could simply market themselves elsewhere.
The Agreement also ensures that Indian students graduating with at least a bachelor’s degree can work for two years, or four years for a doctorate. New Zealand already has a Post Study Work Visa allowing stays of up to three years. So it’s slightly longer than the current visa, but not different in kind.
That visa solves a real problem. Graduates eligible to apply for a skilled migrant visa if they had a job offer in hand may not be able to secure that offer if their visas are soon to expire. The post-study visa bridges the gap without providing a guarantee of a longer visa at the end of it.
The free-trade agreement would seem to constrain future governments against reducing the work rights attached to the post-study visa – or at least as it applies to students from India.
But again, that visa is of limited time duration. And requires successful completion of at least a bachelor’s degree. If the skills provided in a bachelor’s degree are valuable enough to warrant heavy subsidisation by the New Zealand government for domestic students*, it hardly seems to make sense to kick people out on having completed that degree.
If some bachelor’s degrees appear very low value, is that really a problem with the free-trade agreement? Or is it a more general problem – and a far worse one – when we consider the prospects for domestic students taking those courses?
As Covid border restrictions eased, my colleague Dr Michael Johnston suggested a different approach. The government could do away with post-study visas and instead accredit specific tertiary study programmes as fast-tracks to residence. Maintaining accreditation would require demonstrating that graduates secure appropriate employment. Domestic students might also benefit from knowing which programmes are accredited, and which are not.
There are always potential problems in student visa settings, and in accreditation of schools authorised to take on foreign students. And it is always worth watching that those settings are right. But none of those problems would be reasonably solved by targeting students from India or any other country.
Problem diagnosis matters.
** Remember that, according to Universities NZ, domestic fees amount to about 18% of university revenues and government tuition funding makes up about 33%. And that the domestic fees paid by students are themselves heavily government-subsidised through interest-free student loans.
Dr Eric Crampton is Chief Economist at the New Zealand Initiative. This article was first published HERE
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