A little blurb came through a daily higher education email that I received the other day. The title, which mentioned a threat to online learning, definitely caught my eye. The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance wants to start charging a sales tax to its students who take an e-course offered by SkillSoft Corporation, which is based in New Hampshire. Why is this important to all of you readers? New York often sets a precedence on financial activity. If you'll remember, it was New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo who blew the whistle on colleges that were accepting bribes from lenders to be on a preferred lender list for Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP) Stafford Loans. Instead of punishing those few schools who were unethical, all FFELP schools were punished.
Let me preface the rest of this article by saying that I don't know if any schools through Elearners.com use SkillSoft. I performed a search using SkillSoft and came up with nothing, but did get many hits with Skill Soft. The main point of my message is to alert you to the fact that distance learning could be coming under attack in the future. I know this isn't related to the financial aid information I'm supposed to report, but you should be aware of the implications.
Some software companies may already charge a sales tax for software. The whole issue is based on human interaction. Video-based courses offer some type of human interface, but the view of New York State Department of Taxation and Finance is that online courses do not provide this interaction. At best, a mentoring service may be provided. If interface is not available with the professor, then the course should be considered "software" and taxed.
An argument against this proposal is that SkillSoft does provide an elearning venue, but the software is not available to students once they complete the course. In other words, the student is not purchasing the software for permanent use to use over and over; the student does not have a tangible piece of property after the course is finished.
This whole thing will come down to semantics. What constitutes "software" or "transfer of possession"? With this dwindling economy, it's apparent that New York feels that charging a sales tax for online learning will boost its economy. Hmmm, let's see. The trend over the past couple of decades has been to promote distance learning and provide students with a venue to receive a college education in a setting which otherwise wouldn't be available, but now you may have to pay a sales tax as a result.
All I can say is, keep your ears and eyes open. If New York is able to force SkillSoft to charge its students a state sales tax, any online learning course may be up for grabs.