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Number Of Foreign Students Continues To Rise, Select Committee Told
John Gerritsen, Education correspondent
Foreign students contributed more than $3 billion to the New Zealand economy last year, MPs at a select committee have been told.
Appearing before Parliament's Education and Workforce Select Committee this morning, Education NZ chair Tracey Bridges said there were more than 73,500 international students in the country by August last year, compared to 59,000 in the same period in 2023.
"To put it another way, the sector achieved more international student enrolments in two terms of 2024 than it did in the whole of the year before," she said.
Education NZ chief executive Amanda Malu said the total figure was likely to have reached the organisation's 2024 target of 85,000 by the end of last year.
She said there was room for considerable growth but warned previous highs had been reached on the back of more open immigration policies which had caused "anomalies".
"The number I guess that we most refer back to is the 2017 number, which was 125,000 international students. That is when some of the anomalies that were created by opening up our immigration settings started to be addressed. So, there is significant room for growth, there is no doubt about that," she said.
But Malu said education providers had to be able to cope with enrolment increases, and the sector needed to maintain its "social licence" with the wider New Zealand public.
Malu said Education NZ's main role was promoting "brand awareness" of New Zealand as a study destination.
She said that awareness was improving.
Malu said regulation of the education agents who helped to attract foreign students was a "conversation that's live".
She said some education providers were working with 100 or more agents in a market, which was not ideal.
"What we'd really like to be able to get to is a point where we've got really high-performing agents working with our providers who understand the New Zealand offer, who understand the providers that they're working for, and who genuinely put New Zealand near if not at the top of the list that they're presenting to students," she said.
"I think when you have a kind of scattergun approach you do reduce the quality of the applications that you get."
Foreign enrolments dropped due to Covid-related visa restrictions, which stopped the free flow of foreign students from early 2020 through to the end of July 2022.
By that time there were just 14,639 international students in the country, down from about 60,000 when the pandemic began in March 2020.
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