Everyone knows university is expensive. What they don't know is that the number of students getting government help to pay for it just fell off a cliff.

In 2021, 592,359 students received student allowances. By 2024, that number had dropped to 442,833. That's 149,526 fewer students getting support in just three years: a 25% drop. (Source: Stats NZ, taxable-income-sources)

This isn't a story about fewer students. University enrolments haven't collapsed by a quarter. This is a story about eligibility: who qualifies, who doesn't, and what happens to the ones in between.

Student allowances are means-tested. Your parents earn too much? No allowance. You're over 24 and independent? Different rules apply. You're studying part-time because you need to work? Tougher to qualify. The system was designed to target help where it's needed most, but the thresholds haven't kept pace with the cost of living.

A family earning $60,000 in 2021 faced different financial pressure than the same family earning $60,000 in 2024. Rents climbed. Grocery bills climbed. Power bills climbed. But the income thresholds that determine who gets an allowance? They moved much slower.

The result: students whose parents are stretched thin but still earn just above the cutoff. Students who defer study because a student loan alone won't cover rent and food. Students who work 30 hours a week on top of lectures because the allowance they might have qualified for three years ago is now out of reach.

The peak was 2021. That year, more than 592,000 students got support. Then the slide began: 560,739 in 2022, 470,196 in 2023, and now 442,833 last year. Each drop represents thousands of students making harder choices.

The number isn't abstract. It's someone's 19-year-old kid living on two-minute noodles because the parental income test says their family can afford to help, even when they can't. It's someone's adult learner returning to study but finding the safety net has shrunk since they were last at university.

Compare this to 2020, when 579,438 students got allowances. The system supported 136,605 more people then than it does now. COVID drove some of that spike: people retrained, borders closed, students stayed local. But the drop since has been steeper than the rise before it.

If student allowances are supposed to make tertiary education accessible, 130,000 fewer recipients in three years suggests the gate just got narrower. The question is whether that was policy by design or policy by inertia: a system that hasn't adjusted while everything around it got more expensive.