Give the Auckland University Students Our Money Back for WTR

Recently, WTR has been recommended to be optional by the University Senate, rather than being a compulsory course that all first-year students had to complete this year.

This sudden change highlights the unfairness experienced by this year’s cohort. We were the only group of students required to take WTR as a compulsory, fee-paying course—despite it now being deemed unnecessary for future students. Effectively, this year’s first-years have been treated as test subjects, forced to pay over $1,000 for a course that the University itself has now decided does not need to be mandatory.

This has placed a heavy financial burden on us. For many students, especially those who have moved away from home, the costs of study already include course fees, transport, rent, and living expenses. The WTR fee, charged on top of these, has pushed many of us to the breaking point. With the current economy and one of the lowest employment rates in years, finding part-time work has been difficult, and many of us are already struggling to make ends meet. The additional cost of WTR has only added unnecessary stress and hardship.

The definition of the course on the university website is that “Your WTR core course contains foundational knowledge and essential skills designed to help you succeed in your undergraduate study and beyond.” However, if the course truly contained essential skills, it would still be compulsory. By making it optional, the University has contradicted its own description and undermined the justification for charging students such a high compulsory fee.

We strongly believe it is only fair that students who were required to pay for this year’s compulsory WTR course should be refunded. The University has acknowledged, by removing the compulsory requirement, that this was not a necessary or equitable course. To continue to take money from students for a course now deemed non-essential is unjust, particularly in the context of the financial difficulties faced by today’s students.

We don’t think Māori education and history isn’t important. We do, however, think it is unfair to force first-year university students who are already paying around $10k a year for course fees to have an extra $1k put towards something they had no option to do. The course should have been free, and making it paid made a lot of students ignorant towards the content, which was promised to be relevant to our studies and wasn’t, completely ruining the point of the course. The university could’ve gone a different way about integrating Māori history into our studies, but never should have made a mandatory paid course, only to remove it. We deserve to be reimbursed for being test subjects.

News outlets and politicians are already calling for this: ACT calls for Auckland University to pay back students who took compulsory Māori courses

We are asking the University to reconsider this decision, to acknowledge the hardship this has caused, and you, one of the many students who were forced to pay for this course. Please support this by signing the petition.