The Green Party and 33 university student unions have launched an inquiry into student wellbeing.
They claim the Government is completely disconnected from the issues and extreme hardships students are facing.
Victoria University student Lily Lewis is finding university life harder than she ever imagined, working 20 hours a week to pay the rent while in full-time study.
"Having to keep up with everything is stretching me too thin and I'm burning out so quickly," Lewis says.
A key problem is the rising cost of housing.
"We were about 10 days away from being homeless, it was really scary - we couldn't afford a lot of the flats on the market," Massey University student Elizabeth Hodgson says.
"For $205 a week I pay for a room that has mould on the windows, high levels of condensation and my window doesn't even fully close," Victoria University Students Association president Ralph Zambrano says.
Tertiary students have had enough and so has the Green Party, launching a 'people's inquiry' into student wellbeing which aims to survey almost 4000 students.
"We are committed to building the data and high-quality irrefutable evidence for change, because if the Ministry won't do it, if the Government won't do it - we will," Green Party tertiary spokesperson Chlöe Swarbrick says.
"I don't think we need an inquiry into student wellbeing, the Government has been very focused on student wellbeing," Education Minister Chris Hipkins says.
A new code of practice for the pastoral care of tertiary students was put in place this year. It was created after Mason Pendrous' body lay undiscovered in his student accommodation in 2019 for up to four weeks.
But students say that isn't enough.
"We're hearing from students every day who are having to make decisions between paying for the bus to education and paying rent, having to make decisions about whether to have lunch that day," NZ Union of Students' Associations president Andrew Lessells says.
Student allowances and living costs have been bumped up by $25 this month but that doesn't go far when rent prices are through the roof.
"It pays my rent, and I have $1.96 spare," Lewis says.
Evidence of a students' struggle which the inquiry will provide to the Government in a report later this year.
