The University of Otago planned for a 4% increase in student numbers this year. Instead, enrolments are down by 0.9% on last year.
Due to the drop in student numbers, New Zealand's present financial situation, and what the university is describing as chronic Government underfunding, the university is investigating a range of ways to save money, including hundreds of expected job losses, fewer offerings at the university, and asset sales.
After breaking the news to staff yesterday, today acting vice-chancellor Prof Helen Nicholson told media a strategy that outlined what areas to strengthen and "which areas we may need to reduce" would go to the university council in May.
"We know it’s going to be difficult over the next few months," she said.
Prof Nicholson confirmed the university was in the process of identifying what assets might be appropriate to sell and though she could not provide an indication of what might be sold, she said a plan was going to the senior leadership team in the the next 10 days.
"I have to say that the situation has been signalled for a long time, over several years.
"And like other universities and many organisations and businesses we are facing an accelerating situation that needs an immediate response.
"And it’s due to a number of factors — not just this year’s student enrolment, but obviously our student enrolments have affected what we are doing at the moment.
"On balance our 2023 forecast was actually reasonably accurate in accounting for the demographic issues but there were a few assumptions that weren’t quite what we forecast.
"One of those was around the number of students who passed the university entrance — that was lower than previous years and that’s affected most New Zealand universities.
"The other was the retention of our existing students — we had a lower retention of our first years coming back to second year and second years coming back to third years."
The school had budgeted for a 4% increase in students, she said.
One issue was there had been some disengagement when schools were forced to teach online during the pandemic.
At present some courses had low enrolments and the university was running them at a loss.
Students were in this way "voting with their feet".
"Then we obviously need to do research with our students to find out what are the courses or programmes that they want to study."
It was "difficult to answer" how many staff she expected to take voluntary redundancy.
She could not say at this stage how many jobs in total needed to go.
For the voluntary redundancy, the university was hoping people would have left by the end of this year.
If the process required compulsory redundancies, those would take place over the next 18 months.
She said she believed some staff were aware yesterday's news was coming.
"I think people were genuinely pleased that we were being honest and open with them," Prof Nicholson said. "I imagine that as the days go by people will become more concerned and angry potentially at that."
In an email to staff she said the university would be holding another all-staff forum in about six weeks to outline the decisions made and the next steps.
"This will include a clear direction on where we can increase our revenue and cut our costs.
"We need to stop 'doing the same or more, with less', and move to 'doing less and doing it better' if we are to give ourselves the opportunity to excel at what we do best," she said.
