KEY POINTS:
In July the government announced one of the last big education spend ups before the election - $25 million on a new university in Manukau. The new campus is the former Carter Holt Harvey headquarters, near Rainbow's End, and will go someway to making up for years of tertiary neglect in Manukau.
It is hoped the campus will close the skills gap and make tertiary education more accessible for Manukau school-leavers. It will also help provide skilled employees for the expected 21,000 new jobs in Manukau requiring tertiary qualifications that will be on stream by 2012.
Manukau has New Zealand's largest and fastest growing population of under 25-year-olds but only 2.6 per cent of Counties Manukau people are in tertiary education, about half the national average. AUT has bought the property and the government money is a grant to support the purchase. AUT will reveal the full price of the sale in October when it takes full possession.
Acting Manukau Mayor Gary Troup says it is something that the Manukau City Council has been working on for a number of years and believes the facilities and courses on offer will attract those who might not otherwise go on to tertiary training.
"Manukau Institute of Technology has done, and will continue to do, a great job in this city," said Troup in a council press release which seemed to anticipate controversy while appeasing it with flattery.
"The AUT university campus will give our young people another option for getting the skills they need to do well in life. Even tertiary competitors are seeing the new campus as a positive thing."
Peter Brothers, CEO of Manukau Institute of Technology which has 23,000 students enrolled, the large majority of them of them part-time, agrees for the most part. MIT set-up shop in Manukau in 1970 and formed an alliance with Auckland University in 1999 in order to offer a wider range of quality educational opportunities at degree level. MIT - who at one stage were in talks with AUT and the council for a joint initiative - are putting a brave face on the recent turn of events.
"In our view there were a lot of positive options discussed for the location and the Carter Holt Harvey site was one of the options. The government decided to partner up with AUT and purchase the site for them."
Brothers says that MIT, Manukau City, AUT and the University of Auckland are all working co-operatively to get more Manukau people involved in tertiary education.
"Many of the students in Manukau are the first in the family to go into tertiary education. The big hurdle is not so much people who have already decided to get some tertiary education, it's in reaching those for whom it's not even on the radar screen. The issue is not whether the students take a ten or forty minute bus ride to their tertiary institution because once a student has decided they want it most people get it regardless of the commuting time. The real issue is to get people just to take part, not squabbling in competition over those people who've already decided to do a degree of some kind."
Brothers believes the new AUT campus won't really impact on MIT because they deal with different sectors of the tertiary market.
"The government has given assurances that as a university AUT will only be offering university programmes at that site. Yes there is potential for conflict because we both offer degrees in business and degrees in computing and so on but the government has assured us that these conflicts will be managed so you don't get unseemly competition."
When asked whether Auckland University had any plans to establish its own campus or extend its relationship with MIT in the area Auckland University Vice-Chancellor Stuart McCutcheon replied: "Not at this point, but we are in regular discussions with MIT." He doesn't see the new campus "as being harmful" for Auckland University.
"Whether it has an effect on MIT will depend on the kinds of programmes it offers."
AUT Vice Chancellor Derek McCormack - who was a prime motivator for the AUT Manukau campus since his appointment in 2004 - is clearly happy at the outcome. At first the new campus will support up to 1000 equivalent full-time student places depending on funding. AUT became a university in 2000 but started life - like MIT - as a technical institute. In 1989 AUT became the first polytechnic in New Zealand to offer degrees and masters courses. McCormack says AUT's expansion is no threat to MIT as the rapidly growing Manukau population will keep both busy.
"MIT has been working in Manukau for 40 years, it's the named institution and has a lot of support from the community. Quite understandably MIT is a little bit tentative and worried about inviting another tertiary institution of whatever kind into the region and they have expressed a number of concerns about the matter. These have been worked through by the Minister of Tertiary Education and the Tertiary Education Commission. We're there to support what they're doing, to add to it and to extend the range of opportunity to the very large and young population down there. Basically there's huge need and potential demand and we can't see that another institution is going to be bad for MIT. In the long run the pie is going to get much bigger and there'll be much more success for all tertiary providers."
The new campus, which will open in 2010, will reflect its student's background and culture.
"In Manukau we've got students who may have different preferences than the students who are going to our other campuses and we want to reflect that in the way we provide education. We'll be in consultation with the community and the Tertiary Education Commission to establish which programmes and the level of funding that we will receive to support that."
In February the Manukau City Council decided not to go ahead with a joint venture with AUT and MIT to establish a council-controlled organisation regarding a tertiary campus in the Manukau area.
So what happened?
"That was something we were working with the Manukau City Council on which got very tied up with a lot of infrastructure that was going on near to the proposed site," says McCormack. "The horizon was extending further out into the future and so we came up with the notion of buying the Carter Holt Harvey site. It's an ideal campus with attractive, good quality buildings already in a confirmation you could use for teaching and research. It has wonderful green spaces surrounding them and is very close to the Manukau CBD and transport links. So we felt we would go for that. MIT for a variety of reasons was less interested in our option so we're moving in on our own. We'll be looking to work with MIT in various ways as we develop, and will be initiating discussions with them on that. We're still working with MIT and the city in the possibility, in the longer term, of a campus to the west of the CBD - which the city is looking to make available - which will have the ability for a larger development than the Carter site."
It's clear the winner will be Manukau's growing population. McCormack predicts that in 10 years the new university will offer courses across the full range of subjects and at all levels and have 8000-10,000 full-time students, something approaching the size of Waikato University.
"It's an emerging university market. It's essential for the good of the region that Manukau people have this opportunity to develop their potential to contribute because they're such a large part of the future workforce of Auckland."
