Hundreds of tertiary students marched on Parliament this week in anger at a Budget that confirmed the end of the fees-free scheme and gave universities the green light to lift tuition fees by up to six percent for the third year running.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis delivered Budget 2026 on 28 May, and tucked inside the spending plan was confirmation that the policy giving students a free final year of study will be gone by the end of this year. The change had already been signalled on 8 May, when New Zealand First leader Winston Peters and Willis flagged the move ahead of Budget day. Scrapping the scheme is forecast to save the Government around one billion dollars over four years.
Students currently in their final year will still qualify, but anyone with more than a year of study left will miss out entirely. For first and second year students who enrolled believing their last year would be covered, the loss is real money. Victoria University students’ association president Aidan Donoghue said many of those students had effectively had the rug pulled from under them.
“For many of our first and second year students, they’ve had $12,000 ripped from them as they made an informed choice to start their studies with a guarantee that at least one year of debt will be forgiven,” Donoghue said, describing the combination of a lost final year and another fee rise as “a one-two punch to the gut”.
The protests were not confined to Wellington. In Dunedin, more than 200 students marched from the University of Otago through the city centre to the Octagon carrying placards and banners, while hundreds more rallied at Canterbury University demanding the policy be reinstated. The mood was about more than this one decision. Many students said they were worn down by years of steady increases, with one protester noting they had faced six percent fee rises every year since starting their degree.
Early childhood education student Rose Schneehagen said the change landed hardest on people who could least absorb it. “People like me are getting messed up and having to be in more debt,” she said.
The Government has framed the move as a matter of value for money rather than an attack on students. Tertiary Education Minister Penny Simmonds said the scheme had not done what it was meant to do, arguing it had not lifted the number of people going into tertiary study. She said the funding “was never a promise” and that priorities shift between budgets.
Simmonds also defended the decision to cut the scheme in one go rather than phase it out. The Government had considered staggering the change so students who began their studies expecting a free third year would still be covered, but decided it was too messy. “It made it more complicated because obviously people start at different times through the year, so it was easier to have a hard end to it, and then it’s really clear for everyone,” she said.
It was not all bad news for the sector. The Budget put 234 million dollars towards letting the Tertiary Education Commission fund 99 percent of student enrolments in 2026 and 2027, a move universities welcomed. Auckland University deputy vice-chancellor for education Sarah Young said the extra money was a clear positive and praised the focus on workforce development and the knowledge economy. “I think that’s excellent,” she said.
Critics argued the funding boost for institutions did little to ease the squeeze on individual students. Nicolas Lewis, a political economist and higher education researcher at Auckland University, said young people were being hit from several directions at once. “They are not getting their final year of fees paid, they’re facing higher fees from universities that will put their fees up to cover increasing costs and they are walking out of university to far more uncertain labour market positions,” he said. Lewis pointed out that New Zealand students still lack the tuition-free access available across much of Europe.
The wider Budget was built around restraint. Willis used her third Budget to preach prudence, pulling the books back into surplus a year earlier than forecast, with a projected 2.6 billion dollar surplus by 2028 and 2029. Health was the headline winner with billions in new spending, but the trade-off was a squeeze across most departments and a clear signal to younger New Zealanders that the era of expanding student support is over for now.
With the general election set for 7 November, tertiary education is shaping up as one of the dividing lines between the Government and the opposition. Labour built the fees-free policy and has accused the coalition of balancing the books on the backs of students, a charge ministers reject. Voters who want to see where the parties stand on student support, fees and the wider cost of study can compare them using our voting tool ahead of polling day.
For the students who marched this week, the message was simpler. As one protester put it, there is strength in numbers, and they hope the scenes outside Parliament are a wake-up call rather than the end of the argument.
What do you make of the decision to scrap fees-free and lift tuition fees again? Have your say in the comments below.
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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