MIT sees student jobs as part of new station

Students are expected to become highly visible around Manukau's new central railway station, not only as commuters but as role-model workers welcoming passengers to surrounding shops and cafes.

Manukau Institute of Technology chief executive Peter Brothers sees the $98 million development of a 2km railway line into the heart of the bustling city as the ideal platform for taking education to the people.

He wants to grasp opportunities arising from building a new campus beside and on top of the station, which will be in a 6m trench at the end of the new link with the main trunk railway line.

"Our biggest thing is participation, getting people to think about getting a tertiary education," he said on the site in Hayman Park on Friday, after Transport Minister Steven Joyce had driven a bulldozer to turn the symbolic first sod on the railway project.

"The biggest issue MIT faces is that people in Manukau City take part in polytechnic education at a rate only one-half the national average," Dr Brothers said.

He wants to break the ice between town and gown by encouraging the retail outlets and public facilities he expects to be included in campus buildings straddling the railway trench to hire students.

"I want them to be totally staffed by MIT students because we run catering and hospitality classes and we have our own Manukau school of visual arts," he said.

"So I want a little art gallery there.

"Every retail outlet will have a sign on it, saying: this store is staffed by MIT students - why don't you ask them what they are studying?

"So the people travelling through here will see people working, but also studying, and that's the way of triggering people's minds - getting them to say: if they can do it, maybe I can too."

The institute will build its new campus under a 99-year lease obtained from Manukau City over 3ha of land for a "peppercorn rental".

It intends opening its doors to its first batch of 1500 full-time students in 2012, the year after the railway line is ready, and hopes to increase its roll to 25,000 by 2040.

Mr Joyce said the development deal signalled "the sort of integration between transport planning and land use planning we are looking for" in the Government's expectations for the new Auckland Super City.

KiwiRail is contributing $50 million to the railway project, which has been boosted by $33 million from Manukau City, Government and regional subsidies, and $15.2 million from the Auckland Regional Transport Authority.

Manukau Mayor Len Brown, a contender for the Super City mayoralty, said such transport projects were not only ways of moving people around, but also a way of generating economic growth and community development.

"So we dropped this pebble into the pond, and the first ripple was about educational development," he said.

"As soon as this project was in the office, MIT got themselves into the front row along with other tertiary institutions, and they have powered along beside us in the development of this project.

"It's going to be an absolutely iconic structure and a real magnet for further economic growth and an aspiration for our young people and their educational hopes and dreams."

Regional transport authority chairman Rabin Rabindran said students elsewhere in Auckland were already high users of public transport, even without having transport hubs at their doorsteps.

"What is to be built in Manukau is a transport hub for 25,000 people who attend MIT," he said.

They will be able to get off the train or bus and go straight to class - how good is that?"