Opinion & Commentary
Campuses at your service
As a final provocation to the leftist National Union of Students before the federal election, the government last week re-started debated on its legislation abolishing “compulsory up-front student union fees”.
To a novice observer, the controversy surrounding these fees would be confusing. The Labor Party’s opposition to up-front fees set by universities suddenly vanishes when it comes to non-academic services. The Liberal Party’s support for user charges just as mysteriously disappears, to be replaced by an insistence that there be no compulsory charges that do not “relate directly to the course”.
As we might expect, this bill reflects campus political concerns more than political philosophy, and causes both sides to stray from good policy. To see why both parties are misguided on this issue, we need to look at student unions’ changing role.
Until after World War II, each state had only one university. With few students able to afford interstate or overseas alternatives, universities had virtual monopolies, and students had no market power. In the absence of such power, students needed a capacity to tell universities what they thought. Student unions gave it to them.
This student input was helpful for universities too. Until recently, universities lacked accurate information on how students felt about their university experience. Student unions helped fill the information void, providing feedback on student opinion. Student leaders’ anecdotes and impressions were better than nothing.
The conditions that made student unions relevant have slowly changed. No major capital city university is a monopoly. Universities compete for academic high achievers and fee-paying students, altering universities’ incentive structures. Market forces now do at least some of what student union pressure did in the past.
With students becoming more important, universities survey them to discover their views. Surveys provide much more reliable information on student opinion than student unions ever could. The typical student election, with its low voter turnout and its skew toward political activists, is a sampling error, not a source of representative opinion.
Labor has long used student unions as recruiting agencies and political training centres. This is why they favour compulsory membership and financing of student associations, and why the Liberals want to get rid of them. However Labor’s stance is hastening the demise of effective student representation. Without the accountability of voluntary membership, bodies claiming to represent students have drifted to the political fringe. The National Union of Students’ blanket opposition to reform has reduced it to a protest movement venting anger on the streets. It is not a political player able to win real concessions from government.
Though student unions’ representative function is now ineffective on a national level and near redundant on campus, the services many of them offer are still needed. Some universities still want to create a “campus experience”, and charging all their students is the most effective way to create it. Universal charges create economies of scale, and sunk costs remove disincentives for students to involve themselves in what’s on offer. The importance of student services is not an argument in favour of student unions, though. Rather, their importance means universities should take full control of these services themselves, instead of entrusting them to the competence lottery of student elections.
This is why the government’s plan to ban any compulsory payments not directly related to a course is a mistake. Despite the words “student union” in the legislation’s title, it actually prevents universities, not student unions, from levying these charges and creating their own campus experience. Even universities without a student union and with one price for all services would be caught by the law. Whether or not it protects freedom of association, the legislation certainly undermines freedom of contract.
There is a better way to deal with anachronistic student unions, which is to fully expose universities to the market. Some universities would offer a wide range of student services, while others would offer few or none. Well-run services and old-style student unions don’t mix, so market-sensitive universities would replace them with professionally managed organisations. A market system can help solve student union problems, without killing off the campus experience in the process.
Andrew Norton
The Centre for Independent Studies
