University reciprocity

Imagine that you and your high school buddy make a deal when you both start restaurants. He and his family can eat for free at your restaurant forever, and vice versa. Fast forward ten years. Your restaurant's better than his, and you're serving his family more than twice as many meals as he's serving yours. Fair deal?

More Kiwis study in Australia than vice-versa, so it shouldn't be surprising that Oz has been getting a bit annoyed with the reciprocal treatment deal. Here's Universities NZ (HT: Dave Guerin):

Universities New Zealand is disappointed by proposed changes by the Australian government that would see New Zealand citizens studying at an Australian university being charged the full-fee rate.

This would break the longstanding reciprocal arrangement between the two countries where students can study in each other’s universities at the domestic fee rate.

We oppose any move that would create a barrier to Australians and New Zealanders studying in each other’s countries.

Currently about 4600 Australian citizens are studying in New Zealand, including 1860 in universities, and over 10,000 New Zealand citizens study in Australian universities.

Australian universities are bigger and have a broader range of offerings, especially once you start getting into graduate studies. The equal-treatment deal would always be pretty likely then to have Australian taxpayers shelling out more to cover Kiwi students than vice-versa.

Rather than get into a huff about unequal treatment and threatening to do things to Australian students studying here, the government might consider offering to just pay the Australians. The government spends thousands of dollars per domestic student studying in New Zealand. Count the number of NZ university students in Australian, net from that the number of Oz university students in NZ, then offer to cut Australia a cheque for something like the NZ domestic tuition subsidy multiplied by the net number of NZ students in Australia.

Update: I've been viewing this entirely in the context of "NZ student moves to Oz for study, and vice-versa". If Oz is instead wanting to impose international student fees on kids who grew up in Oz to NZ parents, and whose parents pay tax in Oz, that's really not on.