Summary

Background

Students who want to become pilots must enrol in specific aviation programmes offered by New Zealand tertiary education organisations.¹ These qualifications, combined with a mandatory number of training hours, lead graduates to achieve a commercial pilot license (CPL) or an Airline Transport Pilot Licence (ATPL).

The provision of tertiary aviation qualifications is relatively expensive both in terms of subsidies and in terms of students’ contributions. The government caps aviation’s Equivalent Full-Time Student (EFTS) in order to constrain costs, to a maximum of 450 EFTS annually. Student loans are also capped so that a maximum of $35,000 per EFTS may be borrowed for tuition costs. This also serves to constrain students’ loan debt.

This report aims at answering the following questions:

• What are the employment outcomes for aviation graduates?
  • Do they get job opportunities as pilots?
  • How much is their income?
  • What is their student loan borrowing and repayment status?
• How many graduates are overseas? Do they come back?
• What differences exist between providers or level of study?

Approach

The report focuses on domestic students who graduated with aviation qualifications. A key caveat is that these graduates are best understood as potential pilots. Inland Revenue tax data do not include workers’ occupations, so it was not possible to identify pilots directly from their employment records. Instead, the analysis selected graduates whose aviation qualifications included the specific training required to obtain a Commercial Pilot Licence (CPL) or Airline Transport Pilot Licence (ATPL). These licences allow graduates to pursue a career as a pilot. This approach cannot confirm that every graduate became a pilot, but it provides reasonable confidence that the selected population is closely related to the pilot workforce.

Graduates were grouped by years of graduation, to uphold the rules of confidentiality and privacy. A wide time window was chosen to provide a comprehensive view of socio-economic events that may have affected both demand and uptake. Results were also compared with those for graduates from other fields of study: veterinary, medicine, dentistry and teaching.

To answer the research questions, the following measures were analysed:

• Leaving debt at graduation.
• Estimated repayment time in years.
• Annual income.
• Percentage of graduates who work in the aviation industry (used as proxy for pilots).
• Percentage of graduates overseas.
• Type of tertiary provider (whether it was one of the four Flight Training Schools (FTOs) preferred by Air New Zealand  or any other one).

Key findings

• The number of aviation graduates was steady over time, with a median of 129 per year.
• Employment outcomes.
  • Sector of work: At any point, at least half of aviation graduates were working outside the air and space transport sector. Over time, there was a shift towards this sector, likely as graduates completed the required flight hours to operate larger aircraft.
  • Income:
    • The median annual income for the 2012-2015 aviation graduates was $38,000 and $62,000 2 and 5 years after graduation. Ten years after graduation, the median was $94,000, with a quarter earning at least $129,000.
    • The median income in 2024 ranged from the $51,000 for the 2020-2024 group and the $128,000 for the 2004-2007 graduating group.
    • The income distribution of aviation and veterinary graduates was similar.
    • The income distribution for other professions with similar costs of education (medical doctors, dentists) increased at a faster rate over time.
    • The median income was higher in the long run for diplomas or bachelor's graduates or if they graduated from 1 of the 4 preferred FTOs.
    • Aviation graduates had a higher median income if the company they worked for operated in the air and space transport sector, or if they worked in large companies.
• Leaving debt and repayment time:
  • The median leaving debt for aviation graduates has declined since the mid-2010s (concurrently with the change in borrowing cap), with the 2020-2024 graduates having a median of $106,000. In 20 years, the median repayment time has increased from 13.8 to 16.3 years.
  • In other high-cost professions (e.g. medical doctors), the leaving debt was higher, but the median repayment time was considerably lower.
• Overseas:
  • A relatively high percentage of aviation graduates were overseas at different points after graduation (around 18-39%), with higher rates for earlier cohorts and generally stable patterns over time.
  • Some professions showed evidence of a reduced percentage of graduates overseas over time, but for aviation graduates the percentage remained relatively persistent, suggesting ongoing international mobility.
• Providers:
  • Graduates from the 4 preferred FTOs generally were more likely to work in the air and space transport sector, less likely to work in other sectors, and also less likely to work in other sectors compared with graduates from other providers.
  • FTO graduates were more likely to be overseas, particularly in earlier cohorts, suggesting greater international mobility early in their careers, although this difference narrowed over time and in some recent cases graduates from other providers were equally or more likely to be overseas.

Footnote

1. These are: the International Aviation Academy of New Zealand, Massey University, the Nelson Aviation College and Southern Wings. See https://www.airnzlearning.co.nz/becoming-a-pilot