Quote of the Day, supporting VSM edition

From Stuff:

Weltec students association association president Therese Keil agreed that it would cause financial issues.

"We will have to cut back on services like stationery, coffee and tea facilities and perhaps we would just look at offering only advocacy services," said Ms Keil.

Sounds good to me.

Choice and VSM

A persistent meme about the proposed Voluntary Student Membership Bill currently before the NZ parliament is that the current situation allows for quantitatively more choice than the proposed bill. Basically, it goes like this.

At the moment, students can have binding referenda on VSM. The bill would force VSM upon them, abrogating them of that choice. Therefore, if you support choice, you should oppose the bill. Often thrown in are some corollaries along the lines that ACT or National are 'forcing' VSM on a probably unwilling student populace.

This brings out an important difference in how people see politics generally. To me this argument is absurd, but to many it rings so clearly true that it needs no more justification. The difference (I think) lies in your conception of the relationship between the individual and society. If (like me) you think that individual rights are the only true rights, then VSM provides more choice - because it devolves it to the level of the individual. On the other hand, if you think collectives and groups can make meaningful decisions that are broadly representative of their constituents, then of course you should let the group 'choose' whether or not they want VSM.

Ultimately this distinction is unlikely to be resolved with respect to VSM, because (as with many political issues), both sides are steadfastly unwilling to acknowledge that the other might have a point, or to admit that their basic principles are even up for debate. But here are a few brief specific reasons which will hopefully be persuasive.

1) The group of university students is wildly heterogeneous, that is, individual students are huge different from each other. There are jocks, nerds, goths, anarchists, conservatives, apathetics, and all sorts of people that don't fit into silly stereotypes and definitions. How can you really say that this group 'chooses' something by simply aggregating their votes? Even calling them a group is stretching it.

2) VSM allows people to 'decide' on universal membership every year. It's like having a (nearly) free referendum! How? Well if everyone supports student unions, then everyone will join. So VSM allows people to make the same choice a referendum would, but every year! If we are interested in 'choice arithmetic' - it seems like VSM is the way to go.

3) Compulsory student membership, properly understood, is the anthesis of choice - and even voting on it is. This is because what you are voting on is whether or not you should stop your fellow students from choosing to leave. So you are choosing whether or not you should be allowed to choose. This isn't like voting in an election, it's like voting as to whether you should have elections at all, or whether everyone's vote should just be the same as yours.

The obvious response is to say that choice isn't that important, and that there are considerations at play. Obviously there are, and you can expect some posts on them in the future. But if you say that, you've conceded to me more or less the point of this blog post, which I am happy with for now.

Update: BK Drinkwater does a much more comprehensive post.

Student's Re-Distribution

Although most associate them with advocacy, the biggest function performed by student unions in New Zealand is redistribution of wealth, and for the most part not very well or fairly.

In 2002 (the last available online figures) the Victoria University Wellington Students' Association (VUWSA) spent a paltry $3000 on organised advocacy, while spending, for example, over $100,000 on funding clubs and another $163,000(*) on providing them with a free place to meet in the Student Union Building. Many of these clubs charge membership fees already. While the union is busy complaining how poor we students are, only just over $20,000 went to helping needy students with food banks, etc, making up about a quarter of a percent of VUWSA's budget in 2002.

Is there any good reason for wealth redistribution within students?

There doesn't seem to be a prima facie reason to fund clubs. Perhaps there is a small positive externality to the rest of students from having a successful sporting club at a university. I suspect the overwhelming majority of the benefit goes to students that are actually members of the club; most people surely realise that Conrad Smith playing rugby at OBU doesn't mean I'm any good. Furthermore most clubs clearly have no demonstrable benefit to the rest of the students - a popular (to use) example is the sci-fi club, who appear to watch science fiction and eat pizza. I can confirm the existence of this club as I have seen their signs in the Student Union Building, although I cannot confirm their activities. But it seems that such clubs (even if this one has had its functions exaggerated) have entirely private benefits, and there is no reason to force the rest of the students to fund these individual pursuits.

What about redistribution towards disadvantaged groups? This doesn't appear to fit in with the 'all students are poor' narrative of NZUSA and the local student unions - it would be like complaining the unemployment benefit isn't big enough, and thus instituting a tax on minimum wage earners to pay for it. However if we accept that some students are reasonably well-off (as we should) it doesn't seem that unreasonable. Most university students do come from advantaged backgrounds and can afford to pay. However, even if disadvantaged students beg every week, they are unlikely to eat over $100 of free bread from the VUWSA food bank, which is what they pay in fees. Consumption of welfare services isn't means-tested but based on want - those who show up get the food, no questions asked (I understand). Presumably there is a correlation between need and want, but it seems there are going to be plenty of other factors involved - how much free time you have, whether or not you know the people in the student union, whether or not you feel accepting handouts is below you, etc. None of these seem obviously proportionally related to how much you actually need the transfer, and in the case of free time, there is probably an inverse relationship, or a correlation with prosperity! This seems like a highly inefficient way to help poor students, especially compared with the Government's ability to do so through allowances and loans (whether or not you think they do so sufficiently at the moment).

If student unions truly cared about students they would abolish all intra-redistributory funding. The best way to help students would be to give them the majority of their union fee back and let them buy their own food, pay for their own clubs, and choose their own representatives.

There are other roles that student unions perform, the highest-profile being advocacy for lower fees. I plan to write on this later in the week. Also yes, the title is a statistics joke. Joke broadly defined.

(*) This also provides offices for the student magazine and VUWSA themselves.