Unitec Institute of Technology


Unitec Institute of Technology is the largest institute of technology in Auckland, New Zealand. 16,844 students study programmes from certificate to postgraduate degree level across a range of subjects from architecture to zookeeping. Unitec is a member of the International Association of Universities.
The main campus is situated in Mt Albert while a secondary Waitākere campus is situated in Henderson and there are various pop-ups throughout the North Shore. It also offers programmes overseas.

History

Unitec was founded as Carrington Technical Institute in 1976 on the Mt Albert site on Carrington road, which has 55 hectares of grounds. The area on which Unitec's main campus is located was formerly home to the Whau Lunatic Asylum, later known as Carrington Hospital. The hospital building is an imposing brick Italianate-Romanesque structure, located at the northern end of the Unitec Campus. The hospital building was the largest in New Zealand when it was built in the 1860s. The hospital was decommissioned during the early 1990s, and the building is now part of Unitec.
The name changed to Carrington Polytechnic in 1987 and then to "Unitec Institute of Technology" in 1994. Unitec applied for University status in 1999, but the Government ruled, somewhat controversially, in 2005 that Unitec did not meet the academic criteria of a university and would remain an Institute of Technology.
In 2006, Unitec opened its Waitakere Campus in the centre of Henderson, West Auckland. The campus is a joint development with the former Waitakere City Council and includes the new Waitākere Central Library. Unitec's Waitakere campus offers mainly introductory computing, preparing for study, and health and social work courses.
In August 2011, Unitec opened a campus in Albany, on Auckland's North Shore, but it was closed in December 2016. On 1 April 2020, Unitec Institute of Technology was subsumed into New Zealand Institute of Skills & Technology alongside the 15 other Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics.

Campus libraries

There are three libraries across the two campuses:

Study areas

Unitec teaches over 128 courses ranging from Short Courses to master's degrees.
The emphasis in all learning areas is for a lot of practical learning as well as theoretical learning. This differs from the traditional model of university-level tuition, which is predominantly theory. For example, the Introduction to Policing course is delivered in partnership with the New Zealand Police. Also, the School of Computing Science has an industry internship program with IBM, which includes the IBM Center at the Mt Albert Campus.