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• IT Enrolments 1999 Report
• 2. Overall Results

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• Sizing the Internet in NZ

A total of 662 courses with some direct relevance to IT were identified, of which 526 had students enrolled in 1999. For the purposes of the survey, a course was defined as equivalent to one paper for one semester, or roughly 0.125 of an effective full time student year (EFTS).

Figure 1 (Table 1) shows the numbers of courses included in the survey distributed by relevance and level. "Relevance" was assessed according to whether the course was intended to teach the use of development tools (such as programming languages), rated "highly relevant"; use of IT packages (such as drawing or modelling packages), rated "relevant"; or about the impact or management of IT, rated "somewhat relevant".

There are generally much greater numbers of, and more specialised, courses offered at higher levels.

Figure 1: IT and Related Courses with Enrolled Students (All Universities)

Table 1: IT and Related Courses with Enrolled Students (All Universities)

In all, there were 43,140 student enrolments (including students enrolled in several courses) of which 34,710 successfully completed their course, giving an overall pass rate of 80.5%.

Taking into account the overall numbers completing courses, and using the evaluation method based on "relevance value points" as discussed in Section 3 and the degree structures discussed in Section 4, the current survey has "discovered" the equivalent of between 1,930 and 2,490 graduates from IT-relevant areas in 1999. This represents 100-150% greater numbers of graduates in IT-related areas over and above the figures provided by the New Zealand Vice-Chancellors' Committee for the 1998 academic year.

Figure 2 (Table 2) shows the number of students completing courses distributed by relevance and level. Student numbers completing "highly relevant" courses are maintained through to the end of the normal undergraduate course (Year 3). The number of students completing Year 1 and 2 "relevant" courses is substantially greater than for Year 3, possibly reflecting a high level of use of computing tools in the teaching of more introductory undergraduate material. The relatively large number of graduate students completing "somewhat relevant" courses reflects a emphasis in graduate schools on management of IT and on electronic commerce, which is likely to increase in future years.

Figure 2: Numbers of Students Completing Courses (All Universities)

Table 2: Numbers of Students Completing Courses (All Universities)

Pass rates were much lower for first year courses than for subsequent years, and were highest for Year 4 and Graduate level courses. Pass rates were also consistently lower for "highly relevant" as opposed to "relevant" and "somewhat relevant" courses at each level.

Table 3: Pass Rates (All Universities)