The student services fee scam must stop

Stuff reports:

The ACT Party is proposing to make university student services feesvoluntary if re-elected in November.

These are compulsory fees charged by universities to fund services and facilities that support learners, but aren’t directly related to academic learning.

They include things like student media (e.g. Salient at Victoria, or Critic at Otago), counselling services, sports and recreation facilities, on-campus subsidised healthcare and clubs and societies.

This year, the fees average just over $1200 for a typical undergraduate student.

That is a huge amount of money, and for facilities and services that get rarely used.

The backdrop to these extortionate fees is VSM, or voluntary membership of student associations. In 2011 they were made voluntary which was a great decision. Many student associations were basically campus branches of the Labour and Green parties, and every student had to pay $100 or so to fund their political activities and campaigns.

The idea behind VSM was that student associations were voluntary, they would focus more on activities of most value to students, and lower fees. There are many faculty student associations that prosper like this (I was president of one that actually attracted more members than there were commerce students!).

But every single student association did a cowardly deal with their university. Rather than actually face the onerous task of having to persuade students that what they do has value, they cut deals where the university would fund them instead through the student services fee. Such fees already existed but used to be around $300.

This turned the student associations into tame house unions. No longer could they rigorously hold the university to account. You can’t get offside with your paymaster. So they abandoned independence, for money.

And just as importantly, universities now had no opposition to increasing their student services fees. They have gone around 300% in the last 15 years. Tuition fees have caps, but student services fees do not. So universities have been using student services fees to pillage students. And no student association opposes this, because they themselves get funded from them. So student associations sold out students in the interests of their own funding.

Today a four year degree can result in a student paying almost $5,000 in these student service fees. Yet no student association even campaigns for these fees to be lowered do they?

So ACT’s policy is welcome and needed. The status quo has seen students face 300% fee increases. And if you did a scientific survey of students as to whether they think they get value for money for what they pay, I think we know what the results would be.