Foreign students will be ‘Third-World elite’

Press, 30 December 1988, Page 7

Foreign students will be ‘Third-World elite’

The New Zealand Government’s latest announcement to allow more places for full fee-paying foreign students will not attract "thousands” of overseas students, but only the Third-World elite, says the Canterbury Malaysian Students’ Association.

With the new policy, only those earning more than $2500 Malaysian a month would be able to send a student to New Zealand for tertiary education, and they would constitute the top few per cent of the Malaysian population, the C.M.S.A. said.

A C.M.S.A. committee member, Mr Quak-Yoong Lee, said there was a misconception that all overseas students were from rich families.

“Most private Malaysian overseas students come from the middleclass income group whose monthly income is about $7OO Malaysian,” said Mr Lee.

“The estimated expenditure for a Malaysian student living in a hall of

residence is about SNZ6OOO a year. Monthly expenditure comes to about SNZSOO. “With the existing 3000 overseas students, about SNZIB million foreign exchange is brought into New Zealand yearly,” Mr Lee said. Without fees, students were already putting a heavy financial burden on their families, often having to borrow from relatives or mortgage their houses. “With full fees ranging from $13,600 to $23,800 Malaysian ($BOOO to SNZI4,OOO) only the very rich from Third World countries can afford to come to New Zealand.”

The real cost of educating overseas students in New Zealand was marginal, with about 75 per cent of universities’ operating costs spent on salaries and the rest mostly on building maintenance. “Reducing a small number of overseas students will not affect the cost. Overseas students are thereby not a burden to New Zealand,” Mr

Lee said. Overseas students were not displacing local students because quotas were in force for most soughtafter courses such as law and commerce. Overseas students were also banned from taking courses such as medicine and architecture, Mr Lee said. “Private overseas students form only 4.5 per cent of the student population. With universities currently catering for 3000 more students thann there is space for, the absence of the small number of overseas students would not solve the problem,” he said. The proposed 10,000 students paying full-cost fees would create further chaos in an already stretched system, Mr Lee said. Some Malaysian pupils who were eligible to come to New Zealand for Form 7 in 1989 had been forced to abandon their plans because they could no longer afford full fees for universities in 1990, he said.