Edited sentence: A buregoning foreign student population is exploited as a cash cow, and either ignored by their (predominantly Pakeha middle class) peers or treated as an object, behind their back of course, of derision ('bloody rich immigrants').Despite these problems, their are a number of world class academics at Victoria producing exciting work, while the burgeoning cultural and night-life of Wellington means that it is an increasingly popular destination for student-consumers wishing to exercise their 'choice' in the education market.Other departments (especially in the humanities) are crippled by chronic underfunding, and high student to teacher ratios because their research is not considered 'economically viable' resulting in poor morale amongst teachers and post-graduates.The once proud instituion pumps out semi-literate commerce graduates, rewarding mediocrity with a piece of paper and a massive student debt.The quality of education that the university has been providing has been steadily degraded by the cancer of managerialism, a result of merciless neo-liberal restructuring of the mid 80s and 1990s.The students in general are a fairly apathteic lot, prefering to consume drugs and other commodities than to overly strain their minds, with many exhibiting that strange blank look often associated with cell-phone overexposure.Today students are known as education 'consumers', education becoming another victim of the degeneracy of the fetish of the cash nexus