Foreign student growth prompts warnings

There are warnings international student enrolments are growing too fast.Sector insiders said New Zealand was benefiting from competitors Australia and Canada putting the brakes on their student numbers, prompting more students to apply to New Zealand institutions.Speaking at a panel organised by ISANA, the association for staff who work with international students, they said this country needed to be more picky and invest more in caring for students while they were here.They said one sign of the pressure was Immigration New Zealand's refusal of thousands of applications from India and Bangladesh in the past three months.Former Auckland university lecturer Angela Liew told RNZ New Zealand could afford to set higher standards for students because more were trying to get into New Zealand institutions."We can now actually get access to the better students that would otherwise have only gone to Canada or Australia," she said."We could keep the recruitment what it is but only take the better ones."Another panel member, Kenneth Leong was himself once an international student and used to be part of the student recruitment industry.He said rising enrolments were good news, but New Zealand could run into the same problems that prompted its competitors to tighten their rules."The risk however is that we get inundated with lots of students and our ecosystem is not prepared to cope with the housing issues, the welfare issues, mental health outcomes," he said.He said a student paying $60,000 a year paid $8000 in GST and more of that money should be used to look after students."It is a lot of money that the New Zealand government is collecting for internationals and we can set aside some of these funds to put in place some additional support structures, some additional training for staff like lecturers, international student managers, and so forth," he said.Dr Liew said failure to support students was not good for them or for New Zealand."When we have one or two bad apples out there with students who weren't well taken care of or are having issues that we didn't deal with it at the time when it needed to be, then we will have complaints or a bad reputation going around and that's what we need to be more concerned and worried about," she said.ISANA executive officer Chris Beard said Australia and Canada shut the door because of a range of problems."Not having enough trained people on the ground, there was also concerns around the accuracy or the authenticity of some advice provided through agents, there was concerns about sub-optimal accommodation for students, and also concerns around were they receiving adequate and timely advice around work rights," he said.He said the same problems could emerge in this country.Beard said other major export earning industries had strong research funding and professional qualifications and international education should too."That's the quickest and the fastest way to propagate exemplary practice and bring some protections and allow us to build that buffer to head off the speed wobbles that both the Australian and Canadian markets experienced," he said.Beard said the government and education institutions needed to invest more in the sector.Education New Zealand chief executive David Downs.SuppliedEducation New Zealand chief executive David Downs said New Zealand's ambition was to grow international education sustainably, not at any cost."We should learn from Australia and Canada, but their experience does not automatically mean New Zealand is heading down the same path," he said."New Zealand has an opportunity to take a proactive approach by listening to students, monitoring emerging pressures, and acting on evidence."Downs said a survey of students last year found 87 percent rated their overall New Zealand experience positively."That is encouraging, but it does not diminish the need to take concerns of student wellbeing seriously or ensure students know where to find help," he said.Downs said a code of practice provided a strong framework for supporting students and it was up to individual providers to decide how to invest their international student revenue.Immigration New Zealand said study visa applications had increased a lot."Between 1 January and 30 September 2026, INZ received 62,630 international student visa applications, compared with 50,565 during the same period in 2025, an increase of 24 percent," it said.It said the rate of refusal had increased too."The overall offshore student visa approval rate has changed from 82 percent in the first nine months of 2025 to 74 percent in 2026," it said.Immigration NZ said in September about 62,700 people held a valid international student visa, approximately 6000 more than in September 2025.