By john Gerritsen of RNZ 

Universities are facing their toughest year of the pandemic yet as domestic and foreign student numbers slump. 

They say the number of New Zealanders enrolling has dropped this year after spiking last year, and foreign enrolments have continued to fall. 

They warn cut backs might be needed and that worries the Tertiary Education Union. 

AUT, Waikato, Massey and Victoria universities reported that domestic and foreign student enrolments had fallen compared to the same time last year. Lincoln said it had more domestic students, and Auckland, Otago and Canterbury had not yet provided figures. 

AUT vice-chancellor Derek McCormack said the strong employment market and the threat of disruption from Omicron had dented domestic enrolments. 

In addition, fewer young people had left school in the university's traditional catchment area with university entrance. 

"Principals have told us that a lot of the students just gave up, it was too difficult. Schools obviously did everything they could but it was just a very difficult situation towards the end of the year with exam preparation and all of those final things that you need to do to catch up," McCormack said. 

He said in 2020 foreign enrolments held up better than expected and in 2021 domestic enrolments had jumped, but this year was not looking good. 

"This year we've got a crunch on both and that will put quite a lot of pressure on finances, and at our university we're just going through a process at the moment with the enrolments having settled looking at where are the potential savings we can make without doing too much damage to our ongoing capability and staffing numbers." 

University of Waikato vice-chancellor Neil Quigley said its domestic enrolments were down too, but for different reasons. 

"While our school leaver enrolments are up, it's people who would normally either leave employment or come back from employment to study who are the missing cohort for this year." 

Quigley said domestic enrolments were pretty strong compared to 2020, but they were not as high as last year's pandemic-driven spike. 

Combined with a continuing decline in foreign enrolments, this year would be the most challenging of the pandemic. 

"This is going to be the toughest for us because our international students are hopefully at the low point in the numbers. With the prospect of the border being reopened later in the year we hope we'll start to see some recovery in international numbers but of course international student numbers have tailed off as existing students have graduated," he said. 

Tertiary Education Union president Tina Smith said it had been told domestic enrolments were down about 10 per cent across universities and polytechnics. 

She said institutions made cuts in 2020, often through voluntary redundancies, and she did not want to see any more this year. 

"A, there's no capacity in the system to do that, but B, what a terrible way to say thank you for all the going over and above that staff have done to ensure that students had a good experience for the last two years in some of the toughest condition." 

Smith said staff were struggling with the Omicron surge and the Government should help tertiary institutions get through.