Grant Robertson

Wellington, July 15 NZPA - The Government's plan to link tertiary education funding to students getting jobs could be counter-productive, the Labour Party says.

Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce said yesterday he wanted to see funding linked to employment outcomes, not just internal benchmarks.

"This will send a strong signal to students about which qualifications and which institutions offer the best career prospects -- and that's what tertiary education has got to be about," he said.

Labour's tertiary education spokesman, Grant Robertson, said he opposed any rigid criteria that would lead universities to focus more on vocational training than education.

"Not everybody who takes a particular course at university is going to end up in a job directly related to that," he told NZPA.

"If you were to put in very prescriptive measures around linking it to employment outcomes, that could be counter-productive."

Mr Joyce says he is confident the linked approach would encourage institutions to provide more support for their students and achieve better results.

But Mr Robertson thinks they might try to "game the system" to take advantage of performance-based funding by moving figures around.

"People will take the opportunity to move around the data to meet the criteria, and rather than getting an overall improvement in performance you just get people ticking the right boxes," he said.