Tertiary Update Vol 16 No 27 - Rising completion targets will cook the books

Tertiary Update is our weekly bulletin about news in the tertiary education sector from the perspective of people working in the sector. Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. Rising completion targets will cook the books This year, nine institutions lost $1.8 million because they did not meet minimum-completion rates, and 35 are at risk of losing funding next year, according to a report by Radio New Zealand. [Read more...] Rallies protest employment laws One of New Zealand's biggest unions, the EPMU, is holding rallies in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch over the next fortnight, highlighting proposed employment laws that are designed to cut pay and remove some basic rights at work. [Read more...] Asian universities attract massive private funding Asian universities are receiving tens of thousands of dollars more of private funding than many other universities, including those in New Zealand, according to a report by the Times Education Supplement. [Read more...] Survey confirms it's time for a Living Wage "Having a job is no longer a guarantee that you will be able to provide for the necessities of life for you and your family. Two out of five children in poverty are in families where one parent works. Low pay means working families are still struggling to provide food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, childcare, power and other necessities." [Read more...] NEETs not working Last week's Household Labour Force Survey from Statistics New Zealand paints a worrying picture for many young New Zealanders. The data shows that there more young people outside the labour force but in education. The minister for tertiary education, skills and employment, Steven Joyce welcomed these statistics as more evidence of a continued "trend of growing employment". [Read more...]   Friend on Facebook Follow on Twitter Forward to a Friend Other news Sydney University management announced that it was going to force numerous academics into punitive teaching-only positions or redundancy because it had miscalculated student fee income. To do this, it shifted the goalposts on work performance: if you hadn't produced four research publications in less than three years, your job was under threat - Sydney Morning Herald Prior to the earthquakes, the University of Canterbury's marketing budget was fairly slim. These days it's hard to miss the campaign. There are billboards, busbacks and adshels, primetime TV ads popping up halfway through Home & Away, cinema ads, radio slots, fliers, posters, a new website and the list goes on - Canta For over 150 years, our nation has recognized that tuition-free primary and secondary schools were absolutely vital to the growth and functioning of our commonwealth. Providing free education, from kindergarten through high school, paid off big for us. Today, though, that's not enough, for open access to a college degree or other advanced training is as vital to America as a high school diploma has been in our past - Common Dreams  follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 New Zealand License.  2013 Tertiary Education Union  You are receiving this email either because you are a financial member of TEU and we have added you to our mailing list, or because we have a record of you previously opting to add yourself to our mailing list. Our mailing address is: Tertiary Education Union PO Box 11 767 Wellington, Wellington 6142 New Zealand Add us to your address book  unsubscribe from this list | update subscription preferences