ACT wants students to choose which campus services they pay for
The ACT Party wants to make a fee that all university students currently have to pay into a voluntary one. Tertiary education spokesperson Parmjeet Parmar announced the policy, which would let students pick which campus services they want and pay only for those.
Right now, universities charge a Student Services Fee on top of tuition. It pays for things like orientation events, student media, clubs, childcare, sports facilities, and health services. At the University of Auckland, the fee in 2025 was $9.44 per point, working out to about $1,132.80 for a typical undergraduate. At Victoria University of Wellington it was $10.44 per point, or about $1,252.80 for the average student. The University of Auckland's 2026 fee remains $9.44 per point, unchanged from the previous year.
Parmar said the party estimates students could save up to around $4,000 on their student loan over the course of a degree by opting out of services they do not use. RNZ
The Government sets rules for how universities charge the fee and what it can be spent on, Education.govt.nz notes. Those rules sit within the Tertiary Education Commission's funding mechanisms and are reflected in annual funding conditions, according to the TEC. ACT's proposal would change those rules rather than scrap the fee entirely.
ACT argued that letting students choose would lead to better-run services. If students can pick what they pay for, Parmar said, student unions and university services would need to improve what they offer or cut back if they cannot attract enough paying students. The party sees this as a way of making services compete: the ones students value would survive; the ones they do not would shrink.
This is not the first time the fee has drawn political attention. In 2011, then Education Minister Steven Joyce said many providers had made significant increases to compulsory levies on all students, Beehive records show. That reform tightened the rules around how the fee was set and what it could be spent on, but kept it compulsory. ACT's proposal goes further by removing the compulsion entirely.
The broader context here is ACT's long-standing position on voluntary student association membership, which the party has pushed for across several elections. This policy takes that principle and applies it to the wider student services fee. It is an ACT Party campaign position, not a confirmed government policy.
In practice, the change would move campus services from a shared fee everyone pays to a user-pays system where you only fund what you use. Student unions, which in many institutions rely on the compulsory fee for a large share of their revenue, would face pressure to show students they are worth paying for. Services like student media, advocacy, and clubs support — which may not have an obvious individual payoff for each student — could be among the hardest to keep going under that model.
Because the Student Services Fee is added to a student's loan, making it voluntary would also reduce how much students borrow. ACT's $4,000 saving figure assumes students opt out of the fee across a full degree. Whether students would actually opt out in large numbers, and what that would mean for services, are questions the policy does not yet answer in detail.
Parmar did not give a timeline for when the policy might take effect or say whether the party would push for it in coalition negotiations. The change would require amending the Tertiary Education Commission's funding mechanisms and conditions, a process that goes through Cabinet rather than Parliament.
No universities or student associations have yet responded publicly to the announcement, based on the information available.
