New Zealand’s Tertiary Education strategy: A Potential Mismatch?

The strategy identifies “particular gaps in market-driven entrepreneurial skills”
Photo: Unsplash/ Chivalry Creative

The government’s recently released Tertiary Education Strategy 2025-2030 signals a shift towards using the sector to address New Zealand’s long-standing productivity issues. But the strategy and its goals don’t always seem to line up.

Universities and polytechnics are now expected to promote innovation, speed up commercialisation, and build much stronger entrepreneurial skills. The hard part will be measuring these things.

The strategy points out “particular gaps in market-driven entrepreneurial skills” and tells universities to expand entrepreneurial education, especially for graduate researchers.

It also recognizes that more people will build careers through self-employment,freelancing,or portfolio work.

At the same time,a new national intellectual property policy gives academic staff the first chance to commercialize government-funded research,showing a stronger expectation that universities will create new ventures and technologies.

The country wants more innovators, founders, and risk-takers. However, several parts of the strategy, particularly how performance might be judged, could unintentionally discourage the entrepreneurial paths it’s trying to encourage.

the wrong metrics?

Graduate earnings are one example. Using early-career income as a measure of how well the education system prepares people for the job market is common internationally, and the strategy treats it as a key measure of success. But entrepreneurship rarely starts with high or steady income.

Founders usually experience several years of uneven or low earnings before their ventures become successful.

When