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The number of people studying teaching has jumped after several years of low enrolment
Universities say hundreds more students have enrolled this year and many have come from overseas.
The enrolment increase has come just in time - the Education Ministry recently warned secondary schools in particular risk major teacher shortages.
At Victoria University, enrolments in secondary teaching had doubled to 210 full-time equivalents.
Students in the course described a variety of motivations for enrolling.
Some said they had teachers in their family.
"Big family, generational teachers," said one.
"In contrast, my uncle just pulled out of teaching getting burnt out from Covid and being pushed up into leadership," said another who added his uncle's other teaching stories were all positive.
Several students said they wanted to help young people.
"I think it's not to be under-estimated the fact that we all kind of love the teaching job. We love teaching students, we love interacting with them, we love helping mould then into future members of our society. It's just a great job for that," said one of the students.
Two students said they quit jobs in government ministries to take up teacher education. One said they wanted to see the difference they were making and the other said he was sick of the toxic environment of their former workplace and expected to work twice as hard for half as much.
Others told RNZ the poor job market was a reason for enrolling.
"When I graduated all of the public policy and economics jobs disappeared," said a student.
"The other reason is my economics teacher was not very good. He put me away in a separate room because I was the only level 3 economics student. I want to make sure that never happens ever again," he said.
The head of the School of Education at Victoria University, Sue Cherrington said this year's increase was expected because last year's enrolments were unusually low and because of the poor state of the economy.
"Over the last 20, 30 years you can see when the economy is poor, when there are recessions, numbers in teacher education go up. Teaching's then seen as a safe, reliable job. You don't often hear of people being made redundant from teaching," she said.
The director of the initial teacher education programme at Victoria, Ben Egerton said most students came straight from completing a degree at Victoria, but there was always a significant number who were changing careers.
"They say 'finally I get to do the thing I've always wanted to do', or 'my own children have had a wonderful education and that's inspired me to become a teacher in a childhood centre or in a primary or secondary school'," he said.
He said collective agreement settlements that resulted in good pay rises for teachers had probably encouraged enrolments too.
The chair of the Council of Deans of Education, Canterbury University's Joce Nuttall said much of this year's increase was due to foreign students.
"The biggest increases are in our international intakes. Most universities either last year or this year have seen some really good intakes. Here at Canterbury for example we've more than doubled the number of international students coming into our teacher education programmes," she said.
Professor Nuttall said that was likely due to immigration changes that made it easier for foreign teachers to get New Zealand residency.
She said they were enrolling in early childhood, primary and secondary teaching and many had come from China, India and Canada.
Nuttall said schools of education could take more students - but they had trouble finding schools willing to provide placements.
An Education Ministry report on teacher education enrolments was expected next month.
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