Auckland International College To Close In 2023

Today, Auckland International College (AIC) announced that it would be closing its doors as a result of the uncertainty posed by New Zealand’s COVID-19 pandemic response.

New Zealand’s only school exclusively dedicated to providing the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP), AIC was founded in 2003 for international and domestic students and has enjoyed unparalleled academic success.

The impact of travel restrictions and ongoing lockdown measures, has seen the current roll fall to 136 students across Years 11 to 13. And, the school’s future ability to continue to attract students has been severely impacted.

The AIC Council said that the school would remain open until June 2023 to enable current Year 12 and 13 students to complete the two-year IBDP.

AIC Council Chair, Nigel Burton said that in making the decision, their focus has been on ensuring current students are not negatively impacted.

“It is a matter of integrity for us to ensure that our students can complete their two-year IBDP uninterrupted and without distraction,” he said.

Teaching staff will be incentivised to remain at the school until after the official closing, including assisting 2023 graduates with their university applications, and will receive generous redundancy allowances.

AIC has been a private education success story for New Zealand Inc, providing a genuine global pathway for domestic and international students. The school has earned a global reputation for academic excellence, including achieving a 100% IBDP student pass rate in 2021.

AIC students have been offered admission from 9 of the top 10 Times Higher Education (THE) world-ranked universities. They have been generously supported with scholarships from AIC and graduated from universities such as Stanford, Harvard, Caltech, MIT, Princeton, UC Berkeley and Chicago in the United States, and from Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College London in the United Kingdom.

“We’re deeply saddened to be closing our doors. We have enjoyed developing a wonderful, engaged community where dedicated and talented teachers have helped students achieve the highest levels of academic success. The closure of Auckland International College is a genuine loss to New Zealand from an educational, economic and cultural exchange perspective,” Nigel Burton said.

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