|
Yikes.
There won't be any ice cream money left over, I'm afraid. The proposed VSU legislation has nothing to do with how much your education will cost or what you'll be paying for, and everything to do with whether or not your peers (students) will have any say in how any of your money is spent.
It would appear that a fair few of you have fallen for the mistaken belief that passage of the proposed VSU legislation is somehow going to put more money in students pockets. The reality is rather different.
The vast majority of what student unions do involves two things.
a) Making uni a fun place to be (which in turn increases retention rates, ie the difference between whether or not you drop out because you have no friends, or stay on because uni life is good). This is well backed up by research done in the aftermath of Western Australia's abortive attempt to implement VSU at the state level in the late 90s.
b) being active participants in university governance (which means you don't get railroaded by your university). If you are or were an undergraduate, your uni's student union is the reason why you had:
- fair hearings for academic and general misconduct
- standardised procedures for complaining about academic staff
- any sort of orientation program whatsoever
- independent counselling or guidance when things went to shit
- the majority of computer labs and study spaces on campus (if not union-owned, rolled out under union pressure)
if you are or were a postgraduate, your uni's student union is the primary reason you had:
- regular, standardised reviews of your supervisors performance (if RHD)
- supervisor code of conduct policies (if RHD)
- any real ownership whatsoever of any intellectual property created by you on university grounds in the course of your degree (if RHD)
- any documentation on how to write your thesis (if RHD or thesis component coursework)
- any seminars or courses whatsoever on how to do anything (ie use endnote, excel, stats, etc)
The sad fact is that the vast majority of what student unions do, most students will never recognise. The PhD student who finds the cure for AIDS (or who invents a better sounding tweeter) will be given the opportunity to profit from his own work and not have all the profits diverted to his or her uni or a private corporation because, unbeknownst to that student, his student union's elected officials were working their freaking asses off for the better part of a year to convince the state government to reject the university's proposed intellectual property statute.
The student who hit her head after tripping on some loose wiring and, as a result of her concussion and the associated headache pain, forgot to turn her mobile phone off during her final exam and failed her year (thus losing her scholarship and being forced to return home to her family in china without a degree or any real chance of ever getting one again), will never appreciate that the appeals process that got her back into australia and into her university to happily finish her degree was only implemented as a result of continued lobbying by her university's student union.
The student who is able to fast-track their degree because they're awarded credits taken as part of another degree (thus saving them a semester or more of redundant study) will never know that it took six months of research and lobbying by the student union to convince the university to allow such credit transfers.
When you read in your university's press release how it's just spent $1.2 million dollars on upgrading study spaces for students, what you don't read is that that $1.2M was only spent after that university's student union commissioned a research study on departmental resources and lobbied at every level of university governance for more than a year, threatening to 'go public' with how poor (and in some cases dangerously unsafe) those spaces were.
Here is the real deal, folks. As a result of the federal government's slashing of education funding (which, if you know much about where prosperity comes from, you'll see is a blueprint for intellectual bankruptcy in Australia come 2015), universities in Australia are completely and totally dependent on the revenues they collect from international students. The way Universities market themselves to these international students is by making university look 'fun' and 'social' and 'engaging', like a summer camp. Right now, the 'summer camp' atmosphere is one part of what student unions provide. Flip thru your uni's international student prospectus and you'll see what I'm talking about.
If the Federal government's proposed VSU legislation goes through, universities are not simply going to let those activities and services dry up - they cannot afford to. Student union budgets are (at least at the sandstone unis) maybe one percent of the university's total budget - a drop in the bucket. So what will happen? Universities will drop the union fee, raise tuition and course fees by a corresponding amount, and seize control over all those events and activities. You'll still pay for them. You may think you'll pay less, but the reality is that universities cannot run events as inexpensively as student unions, for a whole raft of reasons that I'll go into if anyone is really curious.
Universities won't cut those services, since every other modern western nation (with whom Australian universities are in direct competition) has properly funded student unions providing all those glossy-brochure-photo moments. In the UK, the US, Canada and the EU, student unions are funded just like they have been in Australia, for the simple reason that its what works best for students.
So you'll pay the same or more for your education as you do now, but instead of students being involved in uni governance and students having some control over how you money is spent, your university will have complete control over it, with no student-led checks or balances. Remind me again how paying the same money but having less say over how it is to be spent is a good thing?
whoah. VSU rant over. for those of you still reading, come to Altitude this Thursday - 7PM till 10PM! 
___________________
----- Area709.com - Western Canada's Progressive and Trance Portal. Interviews, Feature Articles, DJ Sets and more. My first mix of 2011, "L'Appel du Vide", is now up. -----
.
|
clubs are great 
