This impact brief is part of the Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga: New Zealand’s Māori Centre of Research Excellence (NPM) Te Arotahi policy paper series. This peer-reviewed brief summarises insights from a 2025 study that documents the outcomes of Māori and Pacific Peoples who completed PhDs between 2003 and 2022 (Kokaua et al., 2025). This research provides important insight into Māori and Pacific PhD graduates’ employment, earnings, health, and community engagement up to 15 years following graduation, and helps us better understand the benefits of reaching the highest levels of academic achievement.
All findings in this research brief are from Kokaua et al. (2025) unless referenced otherwise.
About this research
The 2025 study by Kokaua et al. provides the first in-depth, population-level analysis of highly qualified Māori and Pacific graduates. It documents the outcomes of 996 Māori and 438 Pacific PhD graduates from 2003 to 2022, at the time of graduation and at subsequent five-year intervals.
It considers these outcomes relative to a matched group of 1386 PhD graduates who are non-Māori and non-Pacific (nMnP), and to matched groups of 3210 Māori and 1374 Pacific Peoples without a PhD. The comparison groups were created using propensity score matching for age, gender and deprivation using the New Zealand Deprivation Index 2018 (Atkinson et al., 2019) in each year that a Māori or Pacific PhD graduated.