Your Guide (sorta) to the Universities Deficit

The University is at a loss for 2022. Another year in deficit means that we’re with 6 other New Zealand Universities in not being able to, at the very least, keep to budget. Because you don’t have time to read a verbal rampage about this, here’s the gist:

• The university was at a loss of $16.8 million dollars in 2022
• It comes after a 4 percent drop in enrollments of students in the previous year.
• The university is having to pay $748,500 to the Tertiary Education Commission for not spending enough of its funding on enrollments
• The university said part of the overspending was due to:

• $4.6 million on software, 
• $1.3 million on investment loss, 
• $2 million on depreciation and,
• $3.3 million on restructuring fees.

• The university said its goal was to break even.
• Vice Chancellor, Neil Quigley, claimed “a key challenge is that we don’t have changes in our funding, particularly our government funding to compensate for those sorts of things.”

Here’s my take: The university, and Neil Qugley, are talking about spending millions of dollars like they’re buying a lolly scramble at the dairy. “Spent a few mill’ on software changes, sorry guys!” It makes you think how necessary the million dollar ‘investment’ on Steven Joyce’s communications ‘help’ really was. When staff are being cut, and we have a financial guru as Vice-Chancellor, how can we treat spending like this as something that just happens. Some costs are necessary, some are not – especially when you’re approaching a deficit.  Not having “changes in our  funding” seems to signal to me that spending should be cut back.

Now, from experience, Neil and his team don’t like me commenting on the Universities spending but I just have one more thing to spit out. When this money is an investment in our education, our future, why are we not treating misspending like this as offensive? When the guidelines for how much funding they are to spend on enrollments isn’t met, are the students still the top priority?