Engineering at Massey being cut back by 25%. That will most likely be mostly in Wellington is my guess (& the small bit they have in Albany, Nth Auck) - Eng. is run real bad in Wgtn. See http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/3063009/Massey-to-take-knife-to-sciences

Wow, Massey is not really very good at all. Their Engineering programmes in particular are totally dismal and poorly resourced. And today Massey informed all its staff of yet more redundancies - to take effect end of February 2010. After that, there will be even more job losses later next year as well. AUT is way better than Massey as far as education standards for the students is concerned.

These surveys are bogus, as they rate Uni's by the amount of research that is published as the primary indicator. Australian uni's always rate highly because of this reason only. The real indicator is the jobs that grads get and these surveys do not even consider that.

Have to admit, Victoria University has become more and more crap over the years. When I started following its progress even 4 years ago it was a better place. Now its just an institution dedicated to milking money from students by introducing new policies on acquiring degrees (requiring most students to do even more courses to reach the required points) and cutting costs by stripping classes and hiring sleep inducing lecturers.

do we even want more international students?

My boyfriend is current doing a post-doctoral stint at a Uni in the States which is ranked around number fifty & he was worried he hadn't chosen a prestigious enough University to work at.

And that, my dear Robert Stevens, is is the reason he will out-earn, out-learn and out-perform everyone here patting their backs over getting into the top 500.

(incidentally he is also now working with a University ranked in the top ten as well. That's where ambition has taken him....and no, it wasn't about him going to a Uni that had a great ranking - it was about going where he could get the most effective use of his time)

Thanks Matt#14, Ill have fries with that. Seriously though I got to agree with Pisces, your poor attitude leaps off the web-page and smacks you in the face more than any qualification you may have. Waste of a life? It's up to you to make something of it, forget about blaming others - the fact that you could study at a great NZ University like Canterbury for 7 or so years puts you in the elite already. I don't think you really know what a disadvantage actually is.

Mr Nobody #16 - Not all US universities are so great. My son was at a uni in Colorado and he compared his freshman year to School Cert level. And what's more, the students marked each other's papers! He transferred to another uni after 18 months because he didn't think the degree would be worth the paper it was written on. Clearly the top US unis are wonderful institutions but there are a lot of very bad ones, too.

Or we could always read it: there are 200+ universities in the world that are better than Auckland... from my BA and MA experience, that'd be a far more accurate spin to put on things.

@Mr Nobody

Sure, our universities aren't as good as the likes of Stanford and Yale, but I would say that for the most part, we have a much higher average quality of education from universities than the US.

@Migrant

We are not in the bottom 250, we are in the top 500, from what I can tell after a little bit of Googling, there are over 9000 universities in the world. The fact that NZ accounts for 0.06% of the world population, and has 1% of the top 500, goes to show that a good tertiary education is available to a higher proportion of people here than in most other places.