It seems that at about 4.30 today Massey University announced to staff that they were closing enrolments for their summer school at 5pm. They had been due to close on the 1st of November. Seems a bizarre way to do it, and I am not sure if there was a rush in the half hour that they remained open!
The reason as stated on the Massey website is that they have now reached their funded cap and could take no more students in 2010 (except of course full fee paying international students). According to Big News those who had already enrolled may not get to study if there have not been sufficient enrolments in particular courses. Those courses will be cancelled.
As with Victoria closing off enrolments for the second semester this is going to disrupt plans and add costs for students and their families.
But I understand the position the universities find themselves in. Steven Joyce is still not moving to address this issue, and next year will be far worse. He is sitting on his hands, because he actually wants to “dampen demand”, and thinks it will all calm down in a year.
There is a lot of ad-hoc decision making from universities which will be leaving students and parents confused. There really is a need for leadership from the government on this to ensure that we get and retain as many people as possible in tertiary education over the next year.
Leadership from Key. Pull the other one.
Life ruined by Massey’s arbitrary decision? You can take them to the Ombudsmen.
Bleepin disgraceful
I thought education was a human right 
Education also need money to be a right and to be alright for everyone.
This sucks, my partner is half way through a Massey course via distance and it is part of her professional development in her work of adult education.
Those wielding the knife of course have all recieved their tax payer assisted tertiary education and are now happy to pull up the ladder so the tax cuts for Johnnies mates are ensured. High skill economies are not built this way.
True Wheel, NACT have probably done the math and figured out that our tertiary education system is (mostly) helping to build Australia’s high skill economy
I was at a presentation (fees, enrolling etc) and question and answer session given by the Vice Chancellor the previous day, I must have been inexplicably unconscious when he mentioned this!
Remind me again who is the Vice Chancellor of Massey?
How is Mr Maharey doing on the other side of this particular fence?
There is a very simple and easy way out of all of this “Open access to the system; not to specific institutions”. What is required is an integrated tertiary education system with clearly signposted academic pathways in which students are able to enrol in schools, polytechnics, ITOs, wananga etc and more seemlessly around the system with RPL and cross crediting. For this to work there needs to be guaranteed places for students unable to meet the academic benchmarks to obtain credit (normally through associate degrees) and then onto other parts of the system. This is common practice in the United States, and works well despite funding constraints in the University of California system (the key there is that up to 40% of the places are guaranteed for community college/polytechnic students). There is little academic leadership from the institutions (who are encouraged to work to self-intrested) and no systemic leadership from the organisation (TEC) that Steve Maharey set up. If it wasn’t for the thousands of students who are being disadvantaged a lesser person would feel a certain degree of schardenfreude.
Can you ever imagine a supermarket closing their doors to new customers because they had too many customers? No of course not, and yet supermarkets recieve absolutely no government funding.
The real cause of this is clearly the fee caps. Artificially lower price means quantity supply is lower than quantity demanded. Its not hard economics.
Nick C – I see your point, lets put Foodstuffs in charge of the country’s tertiary education system.
@Nick C – I think it has more to do with the government funding cuts. And now they’re meddling even further trying to decide which paths of learning are more valuable than others – this is supposed to be a place of intellectual exploration and development!
Or maybe they should just enroll in Micky D U 
Not just the sudden close off for summer school, but MU have brought forward the dates for semester 1 and full year courses for 2011. I missed out on study in semester 2 this year as I was caught unawares by a bringing forward of the cut off date earlier. I just want to finish my MU qualification, of which I’m nearly done via extramural, but I cannot until the end of 2011 at the earliest. Currently I’m now sitting on MU’s books as a student with an incomplete qualification.
Sorry to hear that