Summer reads: Tertiary education, training courses, jobs - your best Covid-based options

The New Zealand Herald is bringing back some of the best premium stories of 2020. Today we look at Make an Educated Decision, a Herald investigation into what kind of tertiary education and skills will lead to secure jobs.

Where the new jobs are in a Covid world

For 17 years, flying was Luke Emerson's passion.

The Air NZ pilot lost his job when New Zealand's border closed in March. Like thousands of others, he has been forced to rethink his future, and he has enrolled at Unitec to pursue a new passion - architecture.

Emerson is not the only Kiwi whose job has been destroyed by closing our border. Infometrics forecasts that a net 186,000 jobs, or 8.5 per cent of all the jobs that existed in June this year, will have gone by next June.

Surprisingly, however, those losses have been more than offset so far by new jobs.

Enrolments are up in training institutes as Covid-19 forces thousands of Kiwis to rethink their futures - but what kind of tertiary education and skills will lead to secure jobs?

Air NZ pilot Luke Emerson, 36, who was made redundant in July due to Covid-19 and is now studying architecture at Unitec. Photo / Dean Purcell

How to decide where to train or study in NZ

Choosing a training course can be a nightmare. Type "bachelor of commerce" into the Careers NZ list of courses, and you get 102 courses to choose from at 28 institutions including all of our eight universities and 15 of our 16 polytechnics.

Even a narrower choice, bachelor of computer science, brings up 46 options at 24 institutions.

The NZ Qualifications Authority (NZQA) evaluates the educational performance of all training institutions other than universities on a four-grade scale, ranging from category 1 ("highly confident" in their performance) down to category 4 ("not confident").

Just over half of the 401 institutions (213), including most of the polytechnics, are in category 1.

So how do you decide what is best for you?

The Herald looks at how to choose the best place to train or retrain in the Covid recession.

Choosing a training course can be a nightmare. Photo / Getty Images

Who gets into med school? Row over Māori, Pacific preferences explained

Preferred minority groups now take a majority of the places in our two medical schools - but it's still not enough to make our doctors look like us.

Just 120 of the 257 places for domestic students entering medicine at the University of Auckland next year will be available for "general" students, after allocating 77 to Māori and Pacific students, 52 to regional and rural students, five to students from decile 1-3 schools, two to students with disabilities and one to a student from a refugee background.

At the University of Otago, only 82 of the 199 places for domestic students entering this year from first-year health sciences were available to general students after giving preference to 55 Māori, 31 rural students, about 20 Pacific students, about 10 students from decile 1-3 schools and one refugee.

Not everyone gets to study the university course they want and the way we pick medical students has proven especially controversial.

Simon Collins and Kirsty Wynn explain the admissions debate.

Otago University final-year medical student Kapowairua Stephens, 26, is close to realising her dream of being a doctor because of the Māori entry pathway. Photo / Supplied