Last week, in the wake of the OSAP/Tuition announcements, I suggested that while most of the initial focus was on the changes to tuition fees and student aid, perhaps the more significant move was the announcement that many ancillary fees – specifically including student unions fees – were no longer to be mandatory and students had to be given the right to opt-out.

But what does this mean, exactly?  It’s worth going through the details here because the statement is ambiguous.  Here’s what the government backgrounder said:

Students pay fees in addition to tuition. The number of fees and whether or not students can opt-out varies widely among institutions. These additional fees can cost students approximately several hundred dollars to $2,000 per academic year. The added costs can include a wide range of expenses such as student handbooks, non-student related organizations, or club fees.

To ensure transparency, choice and ease of decision-making, Ontario is introducing a plan to ensure non-tuition student fees are clearly communicated and give students choice regarding where their money is spent. Going forward, institutions will be required to provide an online opt-out option for all non-essential non-tuition fees.

Fees used to fund major, campus-wide services and facilities or fees which contribute to the health and safety of students are deemed mandatory, and will remain a part of the fee structure. Essential campus initiatives include: walksafe programs, health and counselling, athletics and recreation and academic support.

So, some things are clear here and others are not.  The first is that what is envisaged is an opt-out rather than an opt-in (which, if you’ve ever read Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge, you’ll know leaves institutions with leeway to frame the choice in ways that encourages the status quo).  The second is that the opt-out is for “non-essential” fees, without a clear definition of what “essential” means.  Who decides?  At the press conference, Minister Fullerton suggested institutions would have a key role in defining what was deemed essential; however, in the circular letter sent to institutional heads it was made clear that the Ministry itself would devise an “Ancillary Fee Classification Framework” which would ensure students “have the flexibility to opt-out of fees for service, activities, associations and groups they do not wish to fund or participate in”.

The only real areas of clarity here are that “athletics and recreation” and “academic support” are exempt under the policy (although most academic support programs come out of general revenues, not ancillary fees).  It’s also pretty clear that certain organizations are very definitely meant to be included: student unions, Public Interest Research Groups, the Canadian Federation of Students, etc.  Everything else is a mystery.  Some obvious gray areas:

–          Health and counselling: I think it’s clear that what the government intends here is institutionally provided health and counselling.  But depending on the school, there are a lot of student union-provided services that come under this heading – sexual assault counselling, student prescription drug plans, etc.  In or out? 

–          Transit Passes.  This is the one a lot of people were commenting on last Friday.  A number of student unions around the province have negotiated transit pass deals with local transportation authorities, saving students hundreds of dollars a year (in some cases almost as much as 10% of tuition). But these deals are usually contingent on bulk purchases – that is, all students must buy them in order for the transit company to offer the rate (limited opt-outs are sometimes available if a student can prove residency well outside the company’s service zones).  If I were determined enough, I think I could make a case for these as an essential campus-wide service, but will the government accept this logic?

–          Career development/services fees:  I don’t see this as necessarily being an “obvious” essential service.  In or out?

–          Student-voted contributions to fundraising campaigns.  There seems to be language in here protecting student fees which go to specific “facilities”.  But what if the student union made a general contribution to a capital campaign?  Or voted to support scholarships (either institutional ones or scholarships run by World University Services Canada?)  In or out?

–          Essential services funded from general student union revenues.  The government says it wants to exempt walk-safe programs from this policy.  But what if they are funded through a student union’s general revenue?  Ditto food banks: I seriously doubt any government wants to get blamed for closing a campus foodbank, but if it’s being run out of student union general revenues, how would you exempt it?  There are some places where student union fees are already disaggregated to a ludicrous degree, at least when it comes to billing statements (Guelph, which itemizes 40-odd student organization costs down to the penny, comes to mind here), but most do not.  Is the idea actually to require student unions to fund each of their activities separately?  How would that work in practice (especially when, once inside the student union, monies are fungible?)

This is a lot of stuff to cover and regulate, and we have no idea how the heck this is going to be done – and there is not a lot of time to figure this out. Institutions must publish fee schedules in a month or two and there is a lot of IT programming that goes into these schedules and payments.  I suspect that in the end, the provincial government, simply for the sake of convenience, will adopt a definition substantially similar to the one that already exists in Canadian tax law designating which ancillary fees are eligible for inclusion in the tuition tax credit.  Tl:dr, all student union fees and bus passes would be out, while pretty much everything else would be in.

Tomorrow: Australia’s Voluntary Student Unionism Experiment