Opinion & Commentary
A neat strategy to save uni student services
A round the country, student associations and universities are fighting hard against the Federal Government's voluntary student unionism legislation.
The University of Canberra and the ANU are part of this common cause. The ANU, however, is in a special position - and a position that has lessons for other student associations and universities.
In January this year, the old HECS system, in which the Government set and collected a charge from students, was replaced by a ''student contribution amount'' which universities set and collected, up to a maximum of 25 per cent more than HECS in 2004.
Within this system, the ANU chose a lower student contribution amount than most other universities - the old HECS rates. Many other universities went straight to the new maximum student contribution. This makes the ANU much better placed than other universities to manage the most contentious part of the VSU bill, the prohibition on the separate, compulsory fee that all universities charge students for non-academic services.
Rather than trying to keep its current two fees, the student contribution amount and the general services fee for non-academic purposes, the ANU can charge one higher overall fee in the student contribution amount. Unlike other universities, the ANU's student contribution amount is below the maximum, and can be increased.
This won't breach the VSU legislation, because the ANU can truthfully say that all the student contribution amount money is for academic purposes.
After all, the student contribution is only that - a contribution to something that costs much more to provide than the amount students pay. It's just that students will pay a slightly higher percentage of total academic costs if the student contribution amount is increased.
With students paying a larger share of their tuition expenses, this frees up other ANU resources to sustain non-academic services.
The Government does not control the revenue the ANU receives from fee-paying students or from its investment portfolio. The Government doesn't currently even control the revenue it provides under the Commonwealth Grant Scheme. So long as the ANU delivers the student places it has agreed to supply, it complies with the law.
As the ANU example suggests, it is not the VSU bill in isolation that will cause problems for the University of Canberra and most other universities. It is the VSU bill's interaction with the maximum student contribution amount set by the Senate.
Because most other universities have already increased the student contribution amount as much as they can, they lack the ANU's flexibility.
For these universities, the non- academic fee operates as a de facto deregulation of the student contribution amount. By abolishing the compulsory non-academic fee, the VSU bill would reduce the new freedom to set student charges that began in January 2005. Few people have spotted that Brendan Nelson is, perhaps unintentionally, proposing to partially unwind one of his biggest achievements in the higher education portfolio.
It is this contradiction that universities and student associations need to work on if they want to save student services. For various internal Liberal Party reasons, the Government is unlikely to back down on the VSU bill. Rather than defeating the VSU bill, the most practical strategy is to work around it by introducing a higher maximum student contribution amount.
The Government can have no in- principle objection to less regulated student contribution amounts. After all, the maximum student contribution amount set by the Senate is less than the Government wanted originally. In other areas of education policy, the Government shows no interest in price regulation. Full-fee paying students at universities are not subject to any price control, even when they are taking out a government loan (though that loan is capped at $50,000). The Federal Government financially assists private schools without imposing any price control.
With nothing else in Liberal Party education policy or general ideology favouring price caps, the current low student contribution amounts are purely a matter of political expedience. If the major higher education interest groups called for an increased maximum student contribution amount, that would change the government's political calculation. They could increase the price cap at much lower political cost.
For universities and student associations, this proposal is also a more attractive political proposition than their current policy stance. They are defending an up-front charge imposed on students who are often struggling to make ends meet. It would be much easier to advocate a single fee that could be deferred through the HECS-HELP loans scheme.
The VSU controversy is a heated debate over a separate fee that we don't need in this new era of universities charging for tuition. Lifting the student contribution amount makes political sense for both sides, and is better policy too.
Andrew Norton is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. His paper ''The Free Market Case Against Voluntary Student Unionism (But for Voluntary Student Representation)'' is available from the CIS web site.
