Stats can’t solve compulsory fee debate

Imprecise data causes confusion among administrators

Tessa Vanderhart, Staff

Student leaders and university administrators are in disagreement over the results of last week’s Statistics Canada tuition study.

University president Emõke Szathmáry took issue with the emphasis on the province-wide increase in compulsory fees, while UMSU president Amanda Aziz questioned the legitimacy of Szathmary’s concern.

Szathmáry criticized the coverage in the Winnipeg Free Press, arguing that there are fundamental errors in the way the data were presented.

“These additional fees were really not something that the university collects to augment its operating budget,” Szathmáry said. “We have very defensible reasons for the increases in fees.”

Aziz countered that while many of the compulsory fees are collected by UMSU, it is the university’s compulsory fee policy that has changed this year. As a result of the new ancillary fees passed by all Manitoba universities, Manitoba has the highest increase in compulsory fees this year.

Aziz also suggested that UMSU’s hard-line approach to the ancillary fee issue has potentially sparked a hard-line response on Szathmáry’s part towards student organization fees.

Szathmáry said that student association fees have been increasing at a rate much higher than the cost of living, if the creation of health and dental plan fees a few years ago is taken into account.

According to Szathmáry the data are presented to appear as though the university is collecting these fees to supplement its operating budget when in reality, collected revenues are specifically allocated.

Szathmáry said that students vote on the institution of endowment fund fees, as well as the amount paid — and emphasized that the fees the university does keep, such as the technology fee, cover the costs of constantly evolving technology.

“Part of the problem is actually Statistics Canada — it assumes that a university is collecting for its own sake,” she said.

Aziz emphasized that the majority of the change in compulsory fees this year is solely the result of the province-wide ancillary fees instituted this year. Manitoba has the highest rate of compulsory fees, but also the biggest change.

She contested the university’s attacks on StatsCan’s methodology, saying that the numbers are useful, if only as comparisons across the country. Aziz also questioned the university administration’s strong reaction to the study.

“While certainly I can appreciate the fact that we need to maintain our image as an institution of higher learning, it doesn’t seem worth the energy to me, when we could be spending our time finding solutions to new ancillary fees that were approved last spring,” said Aziz.

She added that students in many faculties have complained about the way endowment fees are used, since they are not necessarily student-run.

Thelma Lussier, director of the University’s Office of Institutional Analysis, said that the increases to compulsory fees, while painful to students, are not as significant as the study claims. She denied that there was a 25 per cent increase in compulsory fees and said that the new $150 ‘technology fee’ is the only portion of the compulsory fee bundle that goes to the administration.

She said that the data used in the study, as well as StatsCan’s methodologies, were too simple, and added that it is statistically difficult to determine the accuracy of the results, given that only the highest and lowest values of each fee were considered, not averages or proportionality.

The office provides Statistics Canada with the data to complete the tuition cost study each year, in addition to other surveys on post-secondary education like the Maclean’s university study.

Given its high student population, Lussier says that the provincial data is weighted more to this institution, and consequently reflects poorly on the U of M — more so than other universities. She also said that many of the discrepancies in the study come from the differing fee structures among institutions, particularly in the balance of tuition to compulsory fees.

Lussier emphasized that all revenues collected by the university are pooled into a central reserve, so it is impossible to say that certain fees go directly where they are allocated.