Tertiary resourcing
Statistics relating to the funding and resourcing of tertiary education in New Zealand, including tuition subsidies, tuition fees and human resources.
Financial performance of tertiary education institutionsUpdated: May 2023
Statistics relating to the financial performance of tertiary education institutions, including universities, institutes of technology and polytechnics, and wānanga can be found on the Tertiary Education Commission website.
StaffingUpdated: May 2024
At the end of every year the Ministry collects aggregated staff numbers (headcount and full-time equivalent) by a range of characteristics such as full-time or part-time status, subsector, staff-type (academic, research and other staff), gender, ethnic group, and age group.
For 2023, these workforce returns come from eight universities, 16 subsidiaries of Te Pūkenga, three wānanga and 181 private training establishments (PTEs).
- Staffing 2023 [MS Excel, 1mB]
What does the 2023 data show?
- In 2023, the total staff headcount in tertiary education providers was 50,240, a small decrease of 0.7 percent or 375 staff from 50,615 in 2022. Full-time equivalent (FTE) numbers decreased by 1.9 percent from 36,350 in 2022 to 35,650 in 2023.
- Staff headcounts in public providers decreased overall by 1.2 percent in 2023 compared with 2022. However, while university staff headcounts increased by 2.4 percent to 30,975 and wānanga increased by 1.7 percent to 1,770, at Te Pūkenga staff headcounts decreased by 11 percent to 10,480. Staff headcount at PTEs increased by 2.4 percent to 7,015. FTE numbers followed a similar pattern, except at universities where there was a 0.8 percent decrease in staff FTE.
- Staff headcounts in 2023 were 1.8 percent lower overall than pre-Covid in 2019, while the overall FTE was 1.2 percent lower.
- The percentage of academic staff who were Māori remained the same in 2023 at universities (eight percent), wānanga (82 percent) and PTEs (17 percent), and increased at Te Pūkenga from 13 percent in 2022 to 14 percent in 2023.
- The percentage of academic staff who were Pacific Peoples remained the same in 2023 at universities (three percent), Te Pūkenga (four percent) and PTEs (seven percent) and increased at wānanga from five percent in 2022 to six percent in 2023.
- Among senior academic staff (professors, associate professors, deans and heads of department) at universities, 37 percent were female in 2023, a slight increase from 36 percent in 2022.
- The ratio of students (EFTS) to academic staff (FTE) increased substantially at both wānanga (from 23.0 students per academic staff member in 2022 to 25.7 in 2023) and PTEs (from 11.9 to 13.1), increased slightly for universities (from 18.6 to 18.7 in 2023), and remained steady at Te Pūkenga at 15.0.
- The ratio of students to academic staff in public providers remains lower at 18.0 students (EFTS) per academic staff (FTE) than prior to the Covid-19 pandemic (18.5 in 2019).
- As shown in Figure 1, the ratio of students to academic staff has largely returned to pre-Covid levels at universities and wānanga. At Te Pūkenga, enrolments have generally declined faster than staffing levels since 2016, giving lower student-staff ratios, although this has stabilised in 2023.
Figure 1: Academic staff and students at public providers, 2016-2023, by subsector
Figure 1 shows changes in the number of academic staff (FTE) at public providers, compared with student numbers (EFTS). The scales are set so that the staff and student lines for each sub-sector will overlap at a ratio of 20 students to 1 academic staff member.