Plan to lure university researchers backfires

A Government initiative to attract doctoral students to New Zealand universities has backfired, with existing international fee-paying students complaining of discrimination and "dirty tricks".

The newly implemented Government policy reduces international tuition fees to a domestic level - but only for new overseas PhD students.

The policy aims to attract international and skilled researchers to New Zealand and encourage them to stay.

But ironically it has resulted in students who have been excluded from the policy threatening to take their research overseas.

Affected Canterbury students responded by forming The Committee on Equity for International PhD Researchers late last year.

Committee member Sophy Allen said overseas students were being discriminated against.

"New Zealand students would never accept a situation where existing students were asked to pay up to five times as much as newly enrolled students for the same course, at the same university," she said.

She pays $22,900 in international tuition fees, while new international students pay approximately $4600 for the same PhD.

"When the Government introduced the new and expensive interest-free student loan policy for New Zealanders, it did not exclude existing students.

"Is this because they wanted to avoid a nationwide protest or because the Government only believes in equity for Kiwis?"

The University of Canterbury was initially unwilling to meet with the students, she said, but recently granted them a $5000 bursary, similar to the offer from the University of Auckland.

However, this concession did not remedy the "overt discrimination", which was in blatant violation of the universities' own charters, she said.

The Tertiary Education Ombudsman investigated the situation, and contacted the Ministry of Education suggesting the policy was inequitable.

The Ministry responded by claiming that extra funding had been allocated to universities to enable them to reduce the existing international students' fees, although the universities deny such support.

PhD student Karen Due Theilade said universities and the Government were just blaming each other.

"Students are losing trust in the New Zealand democratic institutions as they appear to use dirty tricks; blaming others while sacrificing us to attract other apparently more 'valuable' researchers."

Ms Theilade said she and several other international PhD students had decided to leave New Zealand if the situation did not improve.

- NZPA