Clearly we currently have too many polytechs. And clearly we need consolidations.

But this proposal to merge 16 polytechs around the country into one? I’d argue that’s taking a good idea too far.

The idea in principle is good. Why would you have 16 different polytechs doing the same thing around the country?

That’s 16 polytech CEOs all receiving 16 probably decent pay packets. That’s 16 PAs, and 16 headquarters (if not more), and 16 payroll systems. That’s an unnecessary amount of duplication.

And it’s clear that something needed to be done because most of those 16 polytechs are headed for the red. This country has already bailed out three polytechs, Unitec, Whitereia and Tai Poutini: that cost $98 million.

And the prediction is that 80 per cent of all those polytechnics will be in deficit in only three years.

But reducing all 16 down to one is going to lose something very important, and that’s competition.

Surely there’s some value in having these polytechnics competing with each other to attract the available students. Competition leads to excellence

Right now, if two polytechs are offering a chef’s course, but all the students are heading to one, you can bet the other, if it has any sense, will look at what’s making that course successful and try to emulate it.

Take the competition out, legislate that there’s only one chef’s course on offer, and suddenly there’s no need to improve to attract the students, because the students have nowhere else to go.

What’s that going to do for employers around this country?

At the moment, if a course is skilling students properly, employers can just draw a line through students from that course and take students from another

But once this happens, and if standards slip in a course, where do employers go?  Because that is the only workforce on offer. 

And don’t kid yourself that the employer can have a chat to the country’s one polytech and ask it to improve.  It’s not that easy.  And what’s the incentive?  The students will keep turning up, improvement or not.

And this doesn’t address the actual problem here, which is that polytechs are suffering because student numbers are dropping off by nearly 20 per cent in seven years alone.

This doesn’t fix that. It just means instead of bailing out 16 polytechs with little bits of cash, we’re bailing out one big polytech with a lot of cash.

And arguably that’s only going to get worse if lack of competition drives down standards which puts off international students, meaning even fewer students.

So, this policy is well meaning, good in principle, but ultimately, possibly going to do more harm than good.