This is the first report to date on non-academic employees in New Zealand universities. It presents and analyses a range of data from the Ministry of Education, and from universities themselves, to investigate the scale and composition of New Zealand universities’ administrative staffing.

It puts these figures into an international context, comparing New Zealand universities with those in four other English-speaking countries – Australia, the UK, the US and Canada.

The report shows that non-academics currently make up a majority of employees at New Zealand universities. Indeed, of all the university systems we looked at, New Zealand employs the most non-academics for every academic member of staff.

Is this large bureaucracy a blessing for our universities, or another case of administrative bloat? It’s a debate that we in New Zealand need to have, and one that this report will help inform.