Kiwi expats at US universities are in a league of their own

They haven't heard of tall poppy syndrome in the Ivy League. This select group is where presidents are trained and it costs NZ$50,000 a year just to be there, so you'd better be very smart (or very rich).

But lurking in their hallowed portals a select cadre of young Kiwis are getting the best brand-name degrees money can buy.

Scattered around the dorm rooms, labs and lecture theatres of America's college towns, the South Pacific invaders share elements of a common experience. They hate the coffee. They get homesick at the sight of a Collins diary. But more importantly, they get the sort of education New Zealand just can't offer.

At around 1000 a year, the number of New Zealanders entering the American higher education system now challenges the number following the well-beaten path to study in the UK.

Many go with the help of scholarships such as Fulbright or those offered through the NZ Vice-Chancellors Committee.

Most opt for postgraduate study - one-year master's courses or longer PhDs - but a rare few, such as Yale sophomore Matt Blackshaw, go direct from high school. The former Rangitoto College student, a US citizen courtesy of his American mom, set his sights high in seventh form.

"I only applied to the top universities," says the ambitious 20-year-old. "If I didn't make it into one of those I was just going to go to Auckland. That's a good university too."

He chose well. The American equivalent of Oxford and Cambridge, the universities of the Ivy League virtually drip prestige from their Gothic brick walls.

The kingpin is the venerable Harvard near Boston, the world's wealthiest university, sitting on an endowment fund of around NZ$42 billion. Only marginally less prestigious, Yale, in Connecticut, is the stomping ground of the political elite - where Bill Clinton romanced Hillary Rodham and George W. Bush started on his father's path to the Oval Office.

Less well-known abroad, the other six still carry considerable cachet within the US.

Ivy or not, the top American institutions are expensive and exclusive on a scale that New Zealand could never hope to replicate.

Harvard and Yale, which both charge around NZ$54,000 a year in undergrad fees, admit only around 10 per cent of freshmen who apply. The comparatively accommodating NYU takes 37 per cent of applicants but still charges upwards of NZ$50,000.

Fortunately for scholars like Nina Khouri, someone else picks up the tab.

Born and bred in Mt Eden, Khouri topped her year at Auckland University's law school, going on to work at Russell McVeagh and boutique Shortland St litigators Gilbert Walker. But in the back of her mind, she always intended to study overseas.

For her master's in international law and dispute resolution at NYU, the 25-year-old picked up a lucrative combo of four scholarships to pay her fees, airfares, and living costs.

Most Kiwi students in the US finance their study with a mixture of scholarship funding, personal savings, and assistance from the university. It makes for a monastic version of the student lifestyle.

For those studying at doctoral level, life's a little more comfortable. Canterbury University-trained physicist Peter Adshead had to pay his own passage to New Haven, the poor Connecticut town where Yale is incongruously located, but his PhD stipend is enough to live on and they even give him health insurance.

"I'm getting paid to study in a pretty great university so I can't really complain," says the laconic 23-year-old, who grew up about an hour north of Auckland.

Adshead ended up at Yale almost by accident after he missed the entry deadline for universities in the UK. He was offered a Fulbright, but turned it down when the money from Yale came through, put off by the Fulbright bonding requirement, which ties scholars to New Zealand for two years after graduation.

Those who don't rely on serendipity find the application process much more gruelling.

"It's long and arduous," says 27-year-old Alastair Cameron, like Khouri, a Fulbright scholar at NYU's law school.

It takes months of form-filling, interviewing and testing and the level of self-promotion required can be challenging for typically reticent Kiwis. What's more, they pay for the pleasure - Khouri estimates applying to seven schools set her back around $1000.

And the results of the application process can seem arbitrary.

At bookstores in Harvard Square, prospective students can buy tomes of earlier application essays that promise to reveal the secret to success. Book smarts are essential, but they won't do the trick on their own.

Cameron, who finished in the top 3 per cent of his class at Victoria, attributes his successful application not just to his academic standing, but also to his work experience - clerking at Chen, Palmer and Partners and then on staff in Marian Hobbs' ministerial office - and his active political life as a former Labour Party youth vice-president.

"You really have to be an all-round person," says Blackshaw. "Everybody I know here is academically qualified but they are also a top figure skater or a top swimmer or a top writer."

There aren't any shortcuts for the application process, although as Khouri would testify, applying for as many scholarships as possible is a good idea.

Depending on your discipline, you might find compatriots in a position to advise you - such as the catchily named Kiwi Physicists Abroad website, which lists 23 scientists throughout North America who are happy to act as mentors to other Kiwis.

Having got his foot in the door at Yale, Blackshaw hopes to fill a similar role. He believes the Ivy League is ripe for infiltration by Kiwi undergrads and has been talking to teachers at Rangitoto about setting up some sort of programme.

Do these bright graduates come back to New Zealand? In many cases not.

"How much is my patriotism worth?" asks Amanda Peet.

For the Canada-based physicist, a respected string theorist, that's the issue when she considers returning to New Zealand. Shared by dozens of other expat academics, it's the problem of the brain drain at its very brainiest.

For one thing, if Professor Peet were to trade her position at the gigantic University of Toronto for a job at a New Zealand university, she would be taking "a really significant pay cut".

But that's only part of the equation: "There's a lack of basic research funding. If there's a single thing that's kept me away from being interested in returning to New Zealand, it's that."

And the situation here is getting worse, not better, she says. "Academics have a much higher workload in terms of teaching, they're getting paid in real terms less than they were when I left, their research grants are often zero or very small, and it's very, very hard for even the brightest person with the most talent and a brand-name PhD under their belt to really produce good work under such circumstances."

To a point, it's inevitable that some Kiwi academics will head out into the global marketplace. But many expats say they'd love to return home, if they only could.

"Sometimes I just wish New Zealand could be towed up into the mid-Atlantic," says Gil Harris, a Shakespeare specialist at George Washington University in Washington DC.

But the English literature professor, who left Auckland in 1987, says New Zealand's size means it simply can't offer the resources and funding he needs.

For Peet, part of the solution lies in abandoning the "peanut-butter principle" that sees resources spread evenly but thinly (six physics departments when the population can really only support two, is the example she cites).

Cosmosologist Richard Easther and partner Jolisa Gracewood, a lecturer in English, also at Yale, have always intended to return home, but after 10 years in the US, they are finding too many practical obstacles in their way.

It's not just about salaries and research funding, Easther says. t's just about easing the transition from the other side of the world into gainful employment at home.

"New Zealand does a very good job of educating and funding its best and brightest to go overseas but doesn't have the infrastructure to bring them back," laments Harris.

* Patrick Crewdson went to the US on the NZ Business Roundtable's Douglas Myers media scholarship.