Postgraduate students are blowing the whistle on what they say are massive cuts to tutoring and casual lecturing jobs at universities.
A postgraduate student said her university had halved the number of hours it paid tutors. Photo: 123RF
The Union of Students' Associations and the Tertiary Action Group told RNZ the reductions were affecting hundreds and possibly thousands of people and were in addition to the 700 permanent roles universities were shedding.
Universities are making the cuts because they are losing hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign student fees due to the pandemic and they say an increase in domestic enrolments is not compensating.
A postgraduate student who spoke to RNZ on condition of anonymity because she feared repercussions said her university had halved the number of hours it paid tutors.
"Someone employed to teach a paper, like a graduate student teaching tutorials, you used to get paid between seven and 10 hours a week and now you get paid three to four hours a week," she said.
"I'm definitely seeing a lot of students around me who thought they'd get tutoring roles and they're not, or they thought they'd get marking work but they've changed the assessments so they don't need marking."
The student said the cuts began halfway through last year when universities started to find savings to make up for the loss of foreign student fees.
She said the reduced working hours had upset her calculations of how she would pay for her living costs.
"You think at the outset, 'what do I need to survive', so you feel like the rug's been pulled out from under you," she said.
A former contract lecturer, who asked not to be identified, told RNZ she worked last year for a department that generally hired seven or eight contract lecturers, but this year hired only one.
She said the contracts paid about 12 hours per week and enabled former postgraduate students to keep "a foot in the door" for permanent lecturing jobs or research grants.
"It's huge in terms of the opportunities that have just vanished," she said.
"There's also the sense that there won't be any jobs in the future. It seems unlikely there'll be any contracts this year and there might not be any next year."
The woman said many people would now have to decide whether to abandon hopes of a career in academia or move on and find work elsewhere.
"It's just heartbreaking and frustrating to hear that even though you're good at your job there's nothing there for you."
The chairperson of a group representing postgraduate students and new academics, the Tertiary Education Action Group Aotearoa, Luke Oldfield, said universities were making huge cuts to casual and fixed term roles including tutors and contract lecturers.
"It would be safe to assume a couple of dozen jobs per faculty per school, you're looking at more per university, you're very likely talking in the hundreds, so if we were to look at the eight universities across New Zealand I would assume safely we're talking in the thousands," he said.
Oldfield said the cuts would make it much harder for postgraduate students to make ends meet because many relied on tutoring for their income.
He said the changes were also bad news for the quality of education.
"We have this onset of rot in terms of the quality of education that our students are getting. So the students are being forced to have much larger class sizes in many circumstances, have less support services around them and then also they have lecturers that have less time on their hands to attend to whatever their inquiries might be."
Oldfield said universities needed more government funding, and postgraduate students desperately needed the government to reinstate their access to student allowances.
The president of the Union of Students' Associations, Andrew Lessells, said universities were making massive reductions to the number of tutors they employed.
"There have been at many institutions effectively hiring freezes when it comes to tutors, when it comes to part-time and casual staff, and that is affecting postgraduate students massively," he said.
"In some cases we're talking there are dozens if not hundreds of students at some institutions who would be employed in a normal year who now aren't," he said.
He says that would harm postgraduate students' incomes and the quality of education undergraduate students received.
"They don't get a student allowance, they have to borrow against a student loan, which will already be quite big by the time they're postgraduate students. So I think the government has a responsibility to bring back the postgraduate student allowance because these students quite frankly, if they can't get tutoring or if they can't get part-time or temporary work with their institutions, they can't afford to live."