New Zealand rarely talks about international education as an export industry. It usually comes up as a housing argument, an immigration headache or a line item in a tertiary funding row. The students themselves see it differently. Education New Zealand’s 2026 International Student Experience Survey found a record 90% rated their overall experience positively, the highest since the survey began in 2019. In 2025 the figure was 87%.
That is a product getting better, and it is worth treating like one.
Almost every measure moved up
The survey drew responses from 6,129 students across more than 100 nationalities. Some 91% rated the education positively, 90% the living experience, 92% arrival and orientation, and 93% the people and connections they made. Almost half called the experience excellent, also a record. Ninety-one percent rated New Zealand a safe place to live.
The exception sits in the same data. Only 55% rated their work experience positively, unchanged on 2025, and just 33% said part-time work was easy to find. It is the lowest of the seven categories and the only one that failed to improve.
More money from fewer students
The headline score is nice. The economics underneath it are better. International education export earnings have reached NZ$4.98 billion, finally clearing the sector’s pre-pandemic benchmark of about $4.4 billion. For context, Education New Zealand’s annual report put 2024/25 revenue at $4.3 billion, up 22.8% on the year before.
Here is the bit most coverage will skip. New Zealand recorded 92,580 international enrolments in 2025, against 115,705 in 2019. The sector is earning more, and satisfying students more, with roughly a fifth fewer of them. This is not a volume recovery. It is a value story.
That is deliberate. Education New Zealand chief executive David Downs said in September that New Zealand offers “something the very large destinations can’t”, describing it as a high-quality education in a safe country where students are known by name. He also warned against “chasing volume for its own sake”, noting the sector’s reputation “took decades to build, and they wouldn’t take long to lose”. This week he went further, telling Mike Hosking the offer is “probably the best of any country in the world”.
It is a rare case of a government agency picking a premium strategy and the numbers backing it.
Canberra and Ottawa are sending us customers
Demand is now surging, partly because Australia and Canada have capped their own intakes. Immigration New Zealand received 62,630 student visa applications in the first nine months of 2026, up 24% on the same period last year, while the offshore approval rate fell from 82% to 74%.
That tightening is not necessarily a bad thing. Screening harder while the pool grows is consistent with a quality-first model. But sector insiders at an ISANA panel in October were blunt about capacity. Kenneth Leong warned the risk is that “we get inundated with lots of students and our ecosystem is not prepared to cope with the housing issues, the welfare issues, mental health outcomes.” The problems that pushed our competitors into caps, including poor accommodation, unreliable agents and weak work-rights advice, are the same ones New Zealand has to get ahead of.
The lesson from Australia and Canada is not that international education is a problem to be managed down. It is that letting quality slip invites the kind of blunt political intervention that wrecks an export sector overnight.
The part business can actually fix
For employers, the one stubborn number is the one that matters most. Students love the teaching, the safety and the people. What they cannot easily get is a job. A third finding part-time work easy is a poor return for an industry that should double as a talent pipeline into a labour market that keeps complaining about skills shortages.
The work score sits where visa settings, employer habits and workplace access collide. Some of that is policy, and the government should make sure work-rights rules are clear and easy to navigate rather than another compliance thicket for small businesses. Some of it is on employers, particularly in hospitality, retail and professional services, who have a pool of motivated, educated, often multilingual workers sitting in their towns and largely ignore it.
The beneficiaries of a $4.98 billion export sector stretch well beyond universities and polytechnics. Accommodation providers, landlords, hospitality operators and regional tourism all take a cut. The skilled migrants who stay take far more over a career.
New Zealand has built something its bigger rivals have just broken. The next 12 months will show whether it can absorb the extra demand without trashing the housing, welfare and work experience that earned the record score. Get the job pipeline working and the survey’s one flat line becomes the sector’s best selling point.
Sources
- Newstalk ZB: Top marks – International student satisfaction hits record high (2026-11-03)
- The PIE News: New Zealand student experience hits record high, but work opportunities lag (2026-11-02)
- Newstalk ZB: International students enjoying life in NZ as numbers begin to recover (2025-09-29)
- RNZ: Foreign student growth prompts warnings (2026-10-15)
- Education New Zealand: Annual Report for the year 2024/2025 (2025-10-30)
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