Transcript
RICHARD COLL: We sent out daily reminders after that six week period to tell students effectively that you need to make this plan or you will be deregistered and a fair chunk of students essentially ignored that then the university senator made a decision early in the year that at some point in time, if students had not paid their fees then they would be deregistered.
ALEX PERROTTET: Would it not have been better to give that final definitive deregistration threat on a Monday with it impacting on Friday rather than over a weekend where people had really had no time to act?
RC: They were then communicated with on the Monday saying that they could have until the Friday of that week in order to clear any debts so they did get another week again on top of that to clear the debt.
AP: We've got students telling us that come Monday they weren't able to access their online student accounts.
RC: They weren't deregistered, there's a sort of technical difference here, they weren't deregistered and taken out of the course, they had their moodle accounts deactivated in order to make it clear to them what the situation was and to drive them to contact us to make some arrangement.
AP: I can understand the university is quite at, I suppose, wits end trying to get students to pay for courses and that's more than fair enough, but do you think the timing could have been better with 8000 students we're told were blocked just out from exams, some would need to access their online accounts to prepare for exams and that doesn't even mention that the stress at this time as well, could there have been other approaches?
RC: The other approach would have been to deregister them as we're entitled to do on week six, and that I would argue would cause even more angst for students because they would then be part way through the semester and have to rush around to try do something about it.
AP: Surely that's a better time than exam period?
RC: If we'd done that, I can pretty well guarantee you would say we didn't give them enough time when we gave them six weeks to do it so I think whatever we did was going to be problematic. The root cause of the problem was the large number of students that did not pay their fees and so the university is in a position like any institution, any university, it is in a position where it needs students to pay fees for the services it provides and in fact, doing it after the exams exposes the university to substantial risk and that is the reason that we've accumulated the debts that we've had. Let me give you a scenario, if a student fails then disappears then that's the last we ever see of them and last year we had a go at that exact model and after the event [we] sought to recover debts from students and it was pretty unsuccessful so once the exams happened then the university's got little capacity to recover debt.
Richard Coll says since the warning, the equivalent of over $US24,000 has been paid.