NZ to weed out 'lazy' students and poor-performing courses

The New Zealand government is taking aim at lazy students and courses with high dropout or failure rates in looming reforms in tertiary education. Prime Minister John Key said last week there were "increasingly urgent problems" in tertiary education, pointing to low-quality courses and students who were lazy or studied year after year without going into the workforce. He said the government had to improve the value it got from the $NZ2.78 billion ($2.2 billion) it spent on tertiary education. Many courses, especially below degree level, had dropout rates as high as 50 per cent. Key said the...