The President Said Today

During enrolment, some of you may have noticed a queue next to the BNZ table. This was a queue of people (myself included) who could not afford to pay all their fees at once and so were applying to pay them on an instalment basis. What these people discovered was that they had to pay an extra $10 for the privilege of being so poor that they could not pay it all at once. It sounds like the Labour government's idea of price control! Anyway, being rather disturbed about all this Colin Feslier and I had words with the Registry. We were told that the $10 was the equivalent of a late enrolment fee, and that the University writes off about $300 a year from students who just dropped out and never paid their fees back. However the late enrolment fee is $20, and whether or not students pay an extra $10 or not does not seem to me to have much to do with how much the university has to write off. Is paying $10 extra an incentive or a deterrent to paying back one's fees?

The whole question of fees will be raised at the first SRC on Wednesday 5 March 12 noon - 2 p.m.

See you there!

Lisa Sacksen