The education minister says overseas students wanting to study here should prepare now, but Immigration NZ has postponed its offshore visa processing opening date
Borders to international students will open next year, but tertiary study providers say with Immigration NZ further delaying visa processing they don't know how to prepare students.
Last week Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins announced the staged reopening of our borders, starting with ditching MIQ for double vaccinated New Zealand citizens and residents in Australia from January 17.
From April 30, borders will open to all fully vaccinated travellers who can self-isolate for seven days, with pre-departure and post-arrival testing.
Hipkins, who is also Education Minister, says the announcement was part of the Government’s commitment to the international education sector.
“I would encourage students wishing to study here to start the process for doing so, so they can be ready to go when the border reopens,” Hipkins says.
“We will work through the details closer to the time, but the crux of it is this is certainty for the sector that international students will return next year.”
However, Immigration NZ has extended the suspension on processing temporary visas, including for students, until at least August 5, 2022.
Independent Tertiary Education NZ chairman Craig Musson says the past 19 months have been a matter of survival for most of the international education sector.
“We never thought it would go on for so long. The first year we managed through with subsidies, but by the end of the year many of these businesses were putting their own money into the business to keep it alive,” Musson says.
“Then going into the second year it’s been more of the same and even harder because most would not have been eligible for the wage subsidy because you can’t prove a 30 or 40 percent decline compared to the previous six weeks because you’ve had nothing to compare to.”
The Government’s targeted financial support to the international education providers ended in June this year.
But the industry’s pleas for additional targeted financial support have been rejected by Hipkins.
Musson says while the border announcement was welcomed, the industry, along with others that relied on international visitors like the tourism sector, needed details to plan sufficiently.
“We need certainty of when those borders are opening and how they're going to open. Agents need to know when they can start promoting but at the same time, we need to start processing visas so that when the borders do open, we can get the students in as soon as possible.”
There is also a lack of clarity around how self-isolation will work for international students when they arrive, and their homestay arrangements.
“It depends on what the rules are. If the rules are too strict, then it's not going to work from a homestay perspective, which means that the students have to go into something like a motel or other accommodation. And that's going to be expensive and potentially put students off from coming here.”
"We need certainty of when those borders are opening and how they're going to open." – Craig Musson, Independent Tertiary Education NZ
Musson says New Zealand’s international tertiary sector is running out of time to compete with other countries opening their borders.
“There's still high interest, but it is going away with other countries opening up. I mean, we're not the first choice as an education destination, so we have to have a point of difference. I get a lot of students from the Philippines and Colombia and parts of South America usually but they'll be looking at Canada and Australia now.”
To survive, agents in New Zealand are sending students to other countries.
“If they get interest from someone from Colombia, they want to come to New Zealand, that would be silly to not refer them to Canada that opened the borders. There's a number of agents that will be sending any contacts they have through other countries just to keep surviving and ending an income. And they've been very hard hit,” Musson says.
International student agent Global Student managing director Bridget Egan says there are still many unknowns in how the transitioned opening of borders will work for international students.
“If we compare to Australia, they were very clear quite a while ago that the first people to be invited back after citizens would be international students. So we need to vocalise the fact that students will have priority over tourists,” Egan says.
“The devil will be in the details as to how easily students can return. We’ll only be able to confirm with them for when they should plan to come once we have details around how this is going to work.”
Egan says she’s receiving fewer requests as weeks go on.
But she says although the news came late it was still welcomed by the industry as New Zealand risked becoming a “pariah”.
A post on Facebook she wrote about the border opening had one comment from a student in Saudi Arabia who said the news was “horrible” as a lack of certainty from the Government led him to delay his masters study twice and he was no longer looking to study in New Zealand.
“I think given what the rest of the world has been doing in terms of opening up [to] students, they've had a really hard time actually believing our advice, that they're not going to be able to travel for the first semester because they see it being possible everywhere else.”
