VSM, Student Services and fees hikes, oh my. - Tactical Ninja
Jan. 5th, 2012
10:49 am - VSM, Student Services and fees hikes, oh my.
This year I will be paying $650 in Student Services Levy. This is up from $522 last year, an increase of $128. I'm a part time student and have no idea what the charge is for full time students. As an adult student who is a NZ citizen with a reasonable amount of support and a good brain, I don't use the student services very much at all - in fact I think I've used Student Health a grand total of four times during my study and nothing else.
Suffice to say I am probably subsidising other people's use of the services, and I don't really mind doing this.
What I do mind is the way this fee increase was slid in after I had enrolled for this year and after the Voluntary Student Membership Bill had passed. What the Bill (now an Act) did was exactly what it says on the box - it made membership of Student Associations voluntary where it had previously been compulsory. It was touted by those supporting it as a way of reducing costs to students, who could now choose not to pay the fee.
My Student Association membership last year was $94.90. The increase in Student Services Levy is $128. So it seems I'm down $33.10 anyway. Cheers, guys - thanks for that cost-saving!
Now, I haven't availed myself of the advantages of Student Association membership in my time studying either - at least not directly. But once again, I have not minded supporting the Student Association. In fact, given a choice of donating my money to Student Associations or directly to Student Services, I would choose the Student Association. Why?
Because it's the existence of Student Associations that makes it possible to fight the battles needed to maintain Student Services at a reasonable cost to students. In New Zealand, Universities have not been immune to the neoliberal "We'll increase your choices by cutting your funding" rhetoric, and they are expected to make money, or at least to continually reduce the amount the government spends on them. Course fees go up, services get reduced, user-pays replaces things that were available for free, and the students are the ones on the receiving end of this, paying more for less service.
The Student Associations are the entities that work on behalf of the students to limit this as much as possible, and the VSM has effectively reduced membership of student unions. Many of the people currently studying probably don't remember when voluntary unionism was introduced in New Zealand in the 1980s, but I do - it was a big deal at the time and looking back over those years now, it was the first nail in the coffin of collective bargaining in this country, that culminated in the Employment Contracts Act of 1991, which was disastrous for workers and only debatably beneficial to employers. Essentially, voluntary unionism disempowered the ability of employees to bargain to improve their conditions by reducing their membership and thus power and isolating individuals in unsupported bargaining positions.
Now, the government has done this to Student Associations. In my opinion this paves the way for the state to continue to put the funding screws into Universities, causing more fee hikes and reductions in services, which will now go more-or-less unopposed due to the disempowerment of the only bodies that would fight back. Students, you're on your own.
So when the introduction of the Voluntary Student Membership Act was followed up at my university by another hike in Student Services Levy (there had been a huge one - $373.03 - the previous year), it pissed me off. It's exactly as I predicted, and sometimes it's not nice to be right.
I mentioned this on Twitter and some guy smugly informed me that since the Levy hike was smaller this year, the VSM had obviously drastically arrested the increase. Yet, the increase only came after the VSM was passed. You tell me whether the increase would have happened regardless, whether it would have been bigger or smaller.
All I know is that the government said it would save me money and surprise surprise, I'm actually paying more. Weasel words, they are a thing.
For that matter, are the living costs still only up to $150/wk? That would barely pay rent. How the hell do under 25 full time students eat?
I get the impression that is the most you can get, and it's abated from there depending on how much you or your parents earn.
So yeah, it's a bullshit amount.
The way things are now, I don't think his father and I between us earn enough to affect him, but that's only because his father apparently has no income right now. The second he gets a job, I become obligated for the YoT's support - and I doubt that I'd actually get any help with that from the one who made it that way, you know?
The whole setup stinks - especially since it was created by people who all got their education fully subsidised.
The flat that I lived in for most of my uni years had rent of $90 - just rent, nothing else. With power, phone, internet etc on top, it was about an extra $20-$30 a week. The most you could get from living costs then was $150. Which left me with $30-$40 to live off each week, and everyting including in food, petrol, clothes etc had to come out of that. It was definitely tight. And since then, I'm pretty sure rent's gone up.
Lee and I are lucky that we managed to find a place in Edgeware for $265 (2 bedrooms, not a unit). Compared to the other palces we looked at, it's REALLY CHEAP.
I'm believe that compared with the cost in the US this is quite low.
On the other hand, the University of Oregon (one of two large state schools here) charges $2400 for in-state, resident tuition for 12 credits (including tuition AND campus fees, not books or class-specific expenses like lab fees). So that's $600 - $800 a class including the student fees. My alma mater, New Mexico State University, is $2900-ish for a full time semester (fees inclusive), from 12 - 18 hours, which is almost three times the amount it was when I graduated in 1996. NOTE, this is undergraduate tuition, graduate school can be more.
Of course, the question you have to ask is whether a degree from a high-end private school is better than the degree from a state school (in terms of getting a better job in trade for all that extra money, not in terms of a quality education -- my discussion here is entirely financial). From what I've been reading, unless you are a) at a top tier school (MIT, Stanford, etc.) or b) in a certain subset of career fields where it really matters (academia, pre-med, etc.) the degree from an expensive school won't get you a higher paying job than two years at Po-dunk Community College followed by two years at Mediocre State University. In fact, in this economy, you may not get a job at all.
When I got my undergrad degree, full time tuition was $1050 a semester. In addition, the overall cost of living was also much lower, so it was feasible to rent a crappy apartment with a roommate or three, buy a crappy student car for a couple of hundred dollars, eat a lot of ramen, and pay your own way through school by working and maybe getting your parents to put you on their car insurance. I'm not sure this is feasible because the cost of living (rent, gas, food) is so much higher and the wages available to an un-degreed student are about the same.
True, most of the funds did go on beer & sausages, but it was a good social thing that got destroyed, and I thought it was a shame.