Immense pressure is being placed on secondary school boards to corporatise, via 'bulk funding'. The government does not have sufficient public support to force this on schools. The implications of deregulation are now facing the tertiary sector. The opening of the tertiary funding to the private sector has wide implications. The NZ government abandoned its rights to restrict foreign ownership of the education sector when it signed the General Agreement on Trade in Services.
Foreign universities are free to set up in New Zealand and claim subsidies like any other body here.
The Irish University of Limerick is investigating opening a campus in Taupo, with enthusiastic support and incentives from the local Taupo bourgeoisie. The increased competition in tertiary education is creating a 'race to the bottom' towards expensive but low quality, low cost, high volume courses. Universities are being turned into polytechs and all are immensely vulnerable to the mass-marketed courses exported from the greater economies of scale of US tertiary institutions. Local research and reflection at the universities has dwindled to a trickle and the remainder is being syphoned off into subsidised research for industry. The tertiary education system has been transformed from a repository of national culture to a training programme for US multinationals.