Everyone knows tertiary education got more expensive. What they don't know is that the safety net designed to catch struggling students quietly shrank by a quarter in just three years.

In 2021, 592,359 students received a government allowance to help pay their bills while they studied. By 2024, that number had fallen to 442,833. That's 149,526 fewer students getting support. Gone. (Source: Stats NZ, taxable-income-sources)

To put that in perspective: imagine every student at Auckland, Otago, and Canterbury universities combined losing their allowance in the same year. That's the scale of this drop.

The timing tells its own story. Student allowance numbers held steady through the 2010s, even ticked up slightly during COVID when thousands of Kiwis went back to study during lockdowns. Then, between 2022 and 2024, the floor gave way. The system lost more students in those two years than in the entire decade before.

This isn't about fewer people wanting to study. Tertiary enrolments are down, yes, but not by 25 percent. Something else is happening. Either the eligibility thresholds are squeezing more families out, or students are making different calculations about whether they can afford to study at all.

Because here's what a student allowance actually does: it determines whether a young person from a middle-income family can go to university without working 30 hours a week on the side. It's the difference between studying full-time and studying part-time while stacking shelves at night. It's the difference between finishing a degree in three years and taking five, or not finishing at all.

The allowance maxes out at $284.57 a week if you're living away from home. That's $14,797 a year. It doesn't cover rent in most university towns anymore, but it covers enough that you can focus on passing your papers instead of just surviving them.

When 150,000 students lose that support over three years, you're not just looking at a budget line item. You're looking at 150,000 individual decisions: take on more debt, work more hours, move back home, defer study, or don't enrol at all.

The data doesn't tell us which choice each of those students made. But it does tell us this: in 2024, New Zealand supported fewer students than it did in 2020, despite having had four more years of population growth, four more years of rising costs, and four more years of politicians saying education is the pathway to prosperity.

The number of students getting allowances is now at its lowest point since 2006. We've gone backwards 18 years while the cost of living has gone in the other direction.