I graduated from Victoria University of Wellington with Bachelors and I’m in my 2nd year working as an architectural technician.

Next year I want to go to a school with the best masters program in NZ or Aus. I don’t want to stay and work in NZ because most of the projects are small and I just want to travel and work/live in countries like US, Canada, UK, etc. I thought ozzy would be a good stepping stone to advance, and I wanted to study my masters there for higher quality education, a different experience as well as that I can hired there more easily if I knew more about the code, construction etc. than if I had all of my experiences in NZ.

Auckland university and Victoria is $8k NZD per year. Every aus uni ranked higher than AU (RMIT, Melbourne, Sydney, monash, NSW, queensland, new castle, south Australia) is in the $20 - $30k AUD (22k-33K nzd) range per year, which is not affordable nor worth it in my opinion. Aus unis like deakin, curtin, Griffith are lower ranked than AU and it makes it wonder what’s the point in going there if they are inferior and potentially more expensive.

From this point I’ve only been basing the quality of university through ranking sites like QS, Shanghai ranking, times higher education, graduate architecture, etc. However there’s more to rating university than that, because Vic is really strong in research meaning their masters program should be really good for thesis. Vic’s facilities are a lot better and learning covers a lot more from visiting AU and speaking to AU students. This makes the ranking seem pretty unreliable, and dismissing Aus universities lower ranked than AU might be unfair.

So what are some good and affordable unis in aus in the same level or better than AU and vic? Right now I’m deciding between AU, vic or any other potential Australian unis, and I would like to hear from people instead reading up their websites which doesn’t give me any real information of how well the university is (since they all praise themselves).

Thanks in advance!