Features

Last month we challenged you to fill out our 2023 Census. 242 brave students took the plunge, five more than in 2022. We made you endure more than fifty questions that you may or may not have spent too much time thinking about when you should have been studying for your exam the next day, and you gave us plenty of answers covering the five broad categories of: Health & Drugs, Academics, Sex & Relationships, Flatting & Money, and Politics. In the end, we collected far too much data to be able to present to you today, but here are some of the more interesting or informative things we found. 

 

 

Let’s say, hypothetically, you’re reading this issue of Te Ārohi on the piss. Maybe you’re in the line for pint night, who am I to judge? Now let’s say, hypothetically, you are wondering if your drinking habits are similar to your peers or not. Well, luckily for you, that’s the first question we’re going to answer for you today: 52.1% of respondents said they drink alcohol at least once a week, and only 15.3% drink at least twice a week. It is possible the percentage is higher than that but they were too busy getting on the piss to fill out some stupid survey, making this sample a bit unrepresentative of the wider student body, but who’s to say? 6.2% of respondents to this question said they did not drink alcohol at all. Woof! was the most popular bar listed by a long shot (see Bar Bracket), followed by The Bog and Carousel. Shout-out to the person that just put the address of a flat on Heriot Row as their favourite bar in Dunedin.

 

And what about vaping? 30.6% of respondents said they vape, which is slightly lower than the 2022 statistic of 34.7%. Interestingly, 21.5% of respondents said they smoke, which is almost double the 2022 statistic of 12.3%. In response to the question “If you vape, how often are you using a disposable vape rather than a refillable vape?” on a scale from one to ten, most people indicated they used either only refillable vapes (1) or only disposable vapes (10). However, the mean response was a 5.9, suggesting that disposable vapes are the dominant type of vape by a small margin. That will likely not be the case for long, as the government changes rules to limit disposables from August this year. Of the respondents who started off vaping, 52% now also smoke cigarettes to some degree. Similarly, of the respondents who currently smoke cigarettes, 62% started off vaping. By far the most popular vape flavour this year was menthol/mint, arguably the plainest flavour possible but also the only flavour you can buy at dairies now. Grape and peach ice were the next most popular flavours.

 

In overall drug use, the percentage of respondents who had tried cannabis (76.6%), nangs (29.7%), and ketamine (18.4%) in their lifetimes was slightly up on the 2022 figures, whilst monthly alcohol (89.7%) and cannabis (23.9%) use was down compared to 2022. Overall, drug use figures appeared pretty consistent across the years.

 

Our last drug in question is caffeine and, as we can see in this chart, coffee is the dominant force for caffeine consumption for students. I did have to remove some more specific individual responses for this pie chart, and placed responses that said Coca-Cola in the “energy drinks” category (listen cokeheads: I get it, it’s not the same. I’m a coke stan myself, but there were only three of you and this just makes it easier I’m sorry).

 

On an unrelated health note, have you got your flu vaccine this year? 38.8% of students said they had, 28.1% said they hadn’t, and 33.1% said they hadn’t but were planning on it. Let’s hope that 33.1% have gotten their jabs in the weeks since.

 

 

Most students who completed the census were third-years, followed by second-years, then fourth-years. Someone please tell the freshers to do the census next year. Four papers came out as contenders for the most-liked paper: CELS191, HUBS191, PHIL105, and ECOL313. CELS191 and HUBS191 are unsurprising as they are two of the highest volume papers which gives them a bit of an unfair advantage in this question, but the same can also probably be said for PHIL105, a philosophy paper in “Critical Thinking”. It’s a mandatory paper for any philosophy degree, but it’s also a common extra paper for people in science, commerce, or other arts degrees. ECOL313 is a lot more niche, but is also the paper where ecology nerds like myself get to spend a week in the Catlins looking at whatever they want in the forest, so it makes sense that it is a favourite for a few people. The next most popular papers were PSYC317, GEND102, and EAOS111, with EAOS111 seeing the single largest percentage increase in enrollments from 2022.

 

Students were also asked how prepared they felt for Uni when they started. The average perceived preparedness was 5.8/10, with males having a slightly higher perceived preparedness (6.0) than females and gender diverse students (5.7 and 5.6 respectively). Was there any difference based on what students did in high school? To put it simply: yes. To put it slightly less simply: maybe?

 

89.9% of respondents did NCEA, and for this graph I excluded various other international high school graduates because the sample size was far too small (usually just one person). I initially wrote this question because I was curious, based on personal experience, if the International Baccalaureate (IB) led students to feel more prepared for Uni than NCEA. 

 

The data suggests it does, but there are a lot of caveats. While I personally did IB overseas, in Aotearoa IB is usually reserved for preppy and expensive private schools. Income and class are well-known predictors of academic preparedness so this is almost certainly a confounding factor in this analysis. So who can say for sure which curriculum prepares you better for uni? It’s also possible that NCEA prepares you more for other stuff, like life in general. All we can say is that if you meet someone who says they did IB, they are statistically more likely to be a nerd.

 

We also asked students how much they trusted OUSA and the Uni. OUSA had an average of 6.76/10, while the Uni had an average of 4.70/10. Were these two levels of trust related to each other in any way?

 

Yes. Tests showed a moderate positive correlation with very strong statistical significance, and we can see in the chart that as trust in one institution increases so does trust in the other. Basically, even though students trust OUSA significantly more than they trust the Uni, some people are just more trusting than others.

 

This chart is a bit hard to analyse, especially after government funding for Unis was announced two days after the census closed. Regardless, it shows a pretty stark level of concern and uncertainty for many students and departments that will likely not go away anytime soon.

 

 

Just like in previous years, it seems that students massively overestimate the amount of sex their peers are having. Either that, or the only people having lots of sex at uni are too busy knocking boots to fill out the census. 

 

When asked about sexual content, 26.2% of people said they do not watch, read, listen to, or look at pornographic or sexual content of any kind, which frankly seems like a lie. One person in their response asked, “Do nudes on Snapchat count?” and I’m not answering that.

 

The most popular celebrity crush listed was Margot Robbie, followed by Zendaya, Henry Cavill, and Julien Baker. There were so many wide-ranging submissions, proving there’s someone out there for everyone. Someone even said Thomas the Tank Engine, and I’ll refrain from making a joke about being a metrosexual. Another person said “Adam DiMarco &/or literally any woman”, which is certainly a range.

 

 

In contrast to celebrity crushes and porn, this section highlighted some stark figures about struggles students are facing. 77.2% of respondents said they were not eligible for any student allowance, so how are they surviving financially? 72.6% had a student loan, 62.2% had money saved up from before university, 56.4% worked part time, and 49.4% received some form of financial support from parents.

 

Only 26.6% have lived in their flat for more than one year, and many students reported going without certain things at some point in the year because of the cost. 73.1% had skipped social gatherings or events of some kind, 57.9% had gone without fruit or veggies, 38% had foregone heating, and 19.9% had skipped a meal entirely.

 

66.8% of students said they had a full driver’s licence, which was almost exactly the same as the percentage of students who said they got around Dunedin via car (66.9%), although not necessarily the same people. Almost everyone said they walked places, 38.9% also said they got around by bus, and 15.9% said they used a bike. There was one reported instance of “drunken teleportation”, but more data is needed to confirm this, and one (former) rollerblader who has “hung up the blades”. Godspeed.

 

 

As expected, the voting intentions of respondents was quite a bit different to polls of the entire country, but the dominance of Green party voters in the chart is quite remarkable. The chart excludes undecided/unsure voters (5.5%) and people who said Other/I will not vote (2.5%). We also looked at where voters in 2020 had turned to for 2023.

 

The chart shows that more than half of Labour 2020 voters are planning to vote differently in 2023, mostly switching to the Green Party but also to National, ACT, and Te Pāti Māori. New voters who were too young to vote in 2020 are also mostly voting Green, but a fair few are planning on voting for National, Labour, and TOP too. TOP was the only party to achieve 100% retention, but their total numbers are still the lowest of the lot. Not a single National voter plans to vote Green. The chart excludes one person who voted for legalise cannabis party, who now intends to vote for Labour, and one person who voted for Te Pāti Māori in 2020 and is now undecided.

 

The data is obviously not reflective of the whole country, only students who filled out the census, but it does highlight some interesting trends ahead of the election this year. The issues and policies influencing voting intentions line up with this data too. The top mention was tax and equality and in particular “the Greens tax policy”, “wealth taxes”, “capital gains taxes”, and “universal basic income”. It’s worth mentioning the census was released within a few weeks of the Greens tax policy being announced and so will have been on people’s minds anyways, but it certainly seems to have struck a chord with many respondents. It also seems there hasn’t really been any other big galvanising policies announced from any other party since.

 

Tertiary support was the other big policy or issue mentioned in responses. As mentioned, two days after the census closed the government announced extra tertiary funding, so it may not be the top priority for as many people today, although many advocates and union leaders who were out protesting see it as a bandaid rather than a solution with more action needed.

 

Rent controls or rental WOFs got the third most mentions. Supporting farmers, breaking up the supermarket duopoly, free dental care, and cheaper GP visits all got a few mentions each too. One person mentioned “military camp for young offenders” as a policy they liked, although the same policy also got more than a dozen mentions in the following question about policies participants disliked. One person said, “Declare war on Australia”, while another said, “Murder Peter Thiel and the rest of the billionaires and use his money to feed all the starving children in NZ to show Jacinda how to really do it.” I wait with baited breath to see which bold political party campaigns on these policies in the election. You’ve apparently got at least one voter.

 

We also cross-referenced gender data onto voting intentions. 64.1% of all participants were female, which was not far off actual uni stats for all students: 60.8% female. 6.1% of participants were gender diverse (non-binary, genderqueer, ‘other’, etc), which is much higher than the 0.3% in the University’s official stats, although being gender diverse (and telling us you are gender diverse) is a much simpler process than being recognised as gender diverse in the eyes of the Uni.

 

Greens had the closest female support to that 64.1% figure (70.8%), and Labour, Te Pati Māori had slightly higher ratio of females, while TOP, National, and ACT had much lower female support.

 

We also looked at voting intentions based on study level and age to see if the idea that you get more conservative as you get older holds any truth within this group of students. As you can see, there isn’t much of a trend in the year-level data, besides liking TOP more as you age, which isn’t exactly conservative. The average age for the combined ‘right wing’ vote (National / ACT) was 20.18, and the average age for the combined ‘left wing’ vote (Labour/Greens/TPM) was 21.25.

 

We also looked at whether drinking habits had any connection to politics, because why not? (For clarity and more robust analysis “I don’t drink” was merged with “Less than once a month”, “Once a month” was merged with “A few times a month”, and “Daily” was merged into “More than twice a week”). The group of students who drank “a few times a month” were the most unsure about their voting intentions. Weekly drinkers had the highest proportion of Labour and TOP voters. The groups of respondents who drank “a few times a month” or “less than once a month” had a higher proportion of Green voters than the two groups of heavier drinkers, and overall it appeared that students that drank less were more likely to vote for a left-wing party than students who drank more often. Unrelated: heavy drinking can lead to brain damage.

 

We also looked at whether preferred caffeine type had any connection to politics, because why not? It doesn’t seem to in any obvious way, although coffee drinkers are the biggest Greens supporters and people who don’t drink any caffeine are the biggest Labour supporters. 

 

 

We received so many thorough responses to the census, and every single one was helpful in compiling all of this interesting data.  The most common responses to people’s favourite spots in Dunedin were the Botans, various bars and cafes, and St. Kilda/Clair beaches. Reading through people’s favourite spots in Dunedin was really heartening though, and so to round us out for another great year of the Critic Te Ārohi Census, here are some highlights: 

 

“Bouldering gym near octy. Also Seacliff asylum near the freaky ghost hatch”, “Cemetery (NOT TO DRINK, just by myself for the vibes)”, “walkway towards port chalmers”, “This one dead tree in opoho park”, “Quarantine Island/Kamau Taurua”, “Past the octagon round all the old buildings at night”, “The meadow above Ross creek”, “Bethunes Gully Walk on a sunny day”, “Brockville at 7:30am on a foggy morning from cockerell street and above (you’re above the cloud like so it’s like looking out of a plane window)”, “Harrington point gun turrets”, and “the suburbia toilets, really gives you that Dunedin vibe everyone talks about”. And of course the many, many people who said “Ur mums house”. She doesn’t actually live in Dunedin though, so checkmate liberals.