THE University of New England has slashed the cost of education for online students, announcing the Student Services and Amenities Fee will be scrapped for more than 18,000 external students from Trimester 1 next year.
Vice-chancellor Jim Barber said the university was the first among its competitors to remove the fee, which would reduce the cost of an online degree at UNE by up to $1120.
“UNE now has the highest percentage of students studying entirely online in Australia. While our on-campus student intake continues to grow at a modest rate, our online enrolments are skyrocketing,” he said.
“Currently, around 80 per cent of our students study online and those students contribute the lion’s share (66.7 per cent) towards the Student Services and Amenities Fee, while receiving fewer of the benefits.
“Online students should not have to pay extra fees for premium services that are primarily intended for students studying on campus.”
“Under the SSAF legislation we are obligated to negotiate with our students about how the funds are expended and the evidence we have to date suggests that SSAF has been of less benefit to online students than we had originally anticipated.”
Professor Barber said there was more that could be done to reduce the cost of higher education if the government removed regulatory obstacles and allowed universities to unbundle services that students neither wanted nor needed.
He said scrapping the Student Services and Amenities Fee for external students was a first step toward unbundling the optional costs of a university education.
“University students around the country are increasingly voting with their feet and not showing up to class, yet we continue to slug them for our full suite of services whether they use them or not,” Professor Barber said.
“This is a pretty inefficient way to run any enterprise let alone a service industry.
“The global education market is moving inexorably in the unbundled direction, meaning that Australian universities will become uncompetitive if they don’t modify their traditional business practices,” he said.
“UNE has made a move towards greater global competitiveness and we’d be prepared to go further if the national regulator would allow it.”
