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- Completion, retention and progression rates
- All completion, retention and progression rates in this report are estimates.
Completion rate refers to the percentage of students who started a qualification in a particular year who had completed after a certain number of years. In this report, completion rates are based on students who started in 1999 and whether they had completed by 2003.
Retention rate refers to the percentage of students who started a qualification in a particular year and had either completed or were still studying towards their qualification after a certain number of years.
Progression rate refers to the percentage of students who completed a qualification in a particular year who were enrolled for further study in the following year. In this report, progression rates are looked at in terms of further enrolment in a higher level of study than the qualification completed.
- Counting students
- This report has moved to counting any student who was enrolled during the academic year, rather than using the 31 July ‘snapshot’ data, as in the baseline report. Students are counted on the basis of unique individuals – so that if a student is enrolled with more than one provider during the same year, that student is only counted once. In a number of places, students are counted in each category they appear in, such as level of qualification, meaning that the sum of the categories may exceed the total number of individuals. For more information on the changes to the way students are counted, see New Zealand’s Tertiary Education Sector: Profile and Trends 2003, pp 12–23.
- EFTS (Equivalent full-time student)
- EFTS is a unit for counting tertiary student numbers. The basis of the EFTS system is that a student taking a normal year’s full-time study counts as a 1.0 EFTS unit or the equivalent of 120 credits on the National Qualifications Framework. The courses taken by part-time students are proportions of 1.0 EFTS unit e.g. 0.75 EFTS.
- Formal student
- For the purposes of statistical reporting, a tertiary student is considered to be a formal student when enrolled at a tertiary education provider in a formal programme of study of more than one week’s full-time duration (i.e. an EFTS value greater than 0.03). The programme must lead to a qualification approved by an authorised certifying body or issued by an institution.
Data on formal students excludes on-job industry training (where there is no enrolment with an education provider) and students at PTEs that neither received tuition subsidies nor offered courses approved for student loans and/or allowances during the year (where the Ministry of Education does not collect full-year data).
- Index
- An index is a way of comparing two or more dissimilar sets of numbers over time. In this report, completions and enrolments are indexed to the value of 100 in 1997 to compare relative growth since then. In effect, the index shows how many completions and enrolments there would be in each of the following years, if there were exactly 100 completions and 100 enrolments in 1997. An index is also used to compare the financial indicators for TEIs, where the value of 100 represents the recommended benchmark for the each indicator. In this case, the index can be thought of as representing the percentage difference between the actual indicator level and the recommended benchmark, so that an index value of 150 represents a level 50 percent above the benchmark.
- PBRF quality ratings
- Staff in TEOs eligible for PBRF funding were required to submit evidence portfolios. Portfolios were evaluated on the quality of research output, peer esteem and their contribution to the research environment.
The quality evaluation results were expressed in terms of a letter-based score, where in general:
- ‘A’ represents highly original work that is of international standing
- ‘B’ represents original work that is of national standing
- ‘C’ represents work that meets or exceeds accepted research standards.
Research portfolios that did not meet these levels were given an ‘R’ score. In general, these were people with insufficient output of the type required for the PBRF assessment over the last six years. They included relatively new researchers who have yet to produce substantial research output, as well as experienced researchers who had not been particularly active in producing output in recent years. It is important to note that an ‘R’ score is a reflection of the low quantity of research output over a specific time period, not necessarily a reflection on the quality of output.
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