The number of New Zealand students studying on Massey University’s three campuses has started to climb again for the first time in a decade, but the union representing staff says the Albany, Palmerston North and Wellington sites still feel like ghost towns once the buzz of orientation week wears off.
Figures released to RNZ show Massey had 12,345 equivalent full time domestic students in 2025, made up of 4,770 on-campus enrolments and 7,575 students learning remotely. Add the 4,040 equivalent full time international students and the university’s total enrolment lands at 16,385.
The on-campus figure is the first uplift in years. It comes after a long slide from a peak of 9,705 in 2016, with the number of students physically attending classes effectively halving in less than a decade. Remote enrolment has gone the other way, sitting almost 2,000 ahead of where it was nine years ago and described by the university as one of the highest on record. International student numbers remain roughly 2,500 below pre-pandemic levels.
Albany and Palmerston North each carry around 2,900 equivalent full time students. Wellington runs at 1,997. Even with the recent lift, those numbers spread across three large campuses leave plenty of empty corridors.
Tertiary Education Union Massey branch co-chair Te Awatea Ward told RNZ staff had been worried for years about how empty the lecture theatres and shared spaces had become.
“They’ve noticed. Particularly last year and the year before there was a great concern at how empty our campuses were, particularly the Albany campus,” Ward said.
The mood lifted briefly at the start of this academic year as fresh faces arrived for orientation. Ward said the optimism did not survive the first lectures.
“This year staff have got very excited from the orientation day and seeing more students on campus. That lasts for about two or three days, and then it goes back to a ghost town.”
Ward sees the pattern as a direct result of how the university now structures its delivery. Online courses are cheaper to run and easier to scale, but they thin out the on-campus experience for the students who do choose to turn up.
“If you want students on campus, you have to provide courses on campus. If you’re wanting to have the maximum number of students qualify or complete with the least amount of financial input you have online courses,” Ward said.
Eight universities chase a relatively small pool of school leavers and adult learners, and Ward noted Massey is not the only one feeling the squeeze.
“There’s definitely a competition for students between the eight universities,” she said.
Massey responded with a written statement rather than putting a senior leader forward. The university said the drop in on-campus domestic students reflected wider changes across the sector and the way people now choose to study.
The shift, the statement said, “reflects a combination of sector-wide shifts and changes in student behaviour, particularly over the pandemic when campus-based students shifted online (which has consistently grown), as well as a move back to campus learning at a time when our portfolio was changing”.
Massey said it was now “moving into a growth phase” through refreshed programmes and new offerings, and pointed to early signs of momentum.
“We are already seeing positive indicators in our pipeline with new domestic on-campus learners up by 4.3 percent year on year, particularly in the Manawatū,” the university said.
That regional detail matters. Palmerston North is the city most exposed to the long term direction of Massey, with the university one of the biggest employers in the wider Manawatū economy. A recovery in on-campus numbers at the home campus is a more meaningful signal than a small lift averaged across the whole network.
The national picture is more upbeat than Massey’s individual story. Ministry figures cited by RNZ show on-campus enrolment across all eight New Zealand universities grew about four per cent to 104,420 students in 2025, slightly above 2016 levels. The system as a whole is recovering, just unevenly.
Massey has not been waiting passively for the on-campus market to come back. Since 2023 the university has cut its physical floor space by 23 per cent, mothballing buildings, consolidating teaching areas and putting surplus property on the market in Auckland, Wellington and Palmerston North. That smaller footprint, combined with the growth of remote study and a tighter cost base, helped the university record a financial surplus for the year.
For staff, the question is what those quieter buildings mean for the kind of university Massey will be in five years. A campus that empties out three days into the semester is harder to recruit researchers to, harder to sell to international students and harder to defend as a vibrant place to learn.
For students weighing up whether to commute, flat near a campus or study from home, the data points the other way. Remote learning is no longer an emergency option from 2020. It is now the dominant way most Massey students engage with the university.
Whether the modest 4.3 per cent lift in new domestic on-campus learners turns into something sustained will depend on what Massey actually puts on the timetable in 2027 and beyond. Course delivery, not marketing, is what fills lecture theatres.
What’s your take? Have you studied at Massey recently, or do you have a view on whether New Zealand universities should be pushing harder to bring students back onto campus? Drop a comment below and join the conversation.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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