If you are a graduating senior or soon-to-be graduating senior, you’ve likely experienced or known someone who’s experienced an affliction that I lovingly refer to as Schrodinger’s Under(Grad) — a situation in which Stevens cannot decide whether to treat said student as a graduate or undergraduate student, and then proceeds to treat them as both or neither at the same time. In the process, transparency is minimal, and literally everything else gets fucked up: financial aid, billing, graduation status, payment plans, loans, and all the fun stuff in between.
I’ll be recounting the ACTUAL experiences of Stevens’ students in this past semester alone, trying to navigate this process. The purpose here is to 1) show the real-life stories of students who have been affected and 2) draw attention to how LITTLE transparency exists in the current system, and 3) underscore why that will cause, as the title indicates, incompetence to rise. Ready? OK.
I’m going to ease you into these stories, and then amp up the horror as we go. Let’s start with a simple one. One student, a current undergrad, got a notification from e-billing indicating that they owed the school another $7K … TWO DAYS before tuition was due. They were, naturally, mortified — where were they going to get that money? Why had no one at Stevens ever warned them about the tuition increase? Why were they being charged as a graduate student, now?
This student had to run around the school for two weeks to get these questions answered, in increasingly confounding ways. They broke down in tears at Registrar. After running around in circles, they finally discovered the error: the school, despite knowing they were staying on during the summer for a grad certification, miscalculated their credit and assumed they’d passed the undergrad threshold. They managed to get re-assigned as an undergrad, and no longer owed the school money, but only after a long struggle.
Another student has a struggle that didn’t end so well. Like the previous student, they were charged an additional $3K fee overnight that needed to be paid within days with no warning from the school. The school had switched their status to graduate (which they had known about before)… but the school failed to warn that they’d lost all undergrad fellowships and scholarships in the process. The student paid the $3K fee immediately just to get rid of it, but it drained their savings in the process. Had the school been a little more timely in warning them about the increase in fees, they could have applied for a loan. But when has timeliness ever been the school’s strong suit?
Here’s the worst part of that story: the person in question actually still WORKS FOR the school. The catch? Despite being charged as a graduate student, they are still PAID by the school as an undergraduate, and with the undergraduate pay rate (which, unsurprisingly, is lower than the graduate rate). You see, Stevens likes to play hard and fast with those rules…you can charge a kid as a grad student, but to pay them as grad, too? Nah. Funny how that works…
Which segues into one last story. Once again, the student in question? Got their status changed from undergrad to grad without warning, around one week before fees were due. This led to a $14K hike in costs. Unsurprisingly, most people cannot pull $14K out of their ass in a week, so the student managed to arrange taking classes at a community college to reduce costs by $8K — but not without running in circles between Stevens and the community college in question. The student also had to pay $1.2K upfront to pay for the community college classes. Still — problem solved, all fine and good, right? Wrong.
Two weeks into the start of the semester, the student gets reverted back from ‘grad’ to ‘undergrad’ without warning or reason by Registrar. Confused, they call Registrar, and get told that their account was submitted for a ‘random check’, and their balance was re-assessed. At this point, the student is confused because what the hell? That cannot be right, and now they owe the school an ADDITIONAL $6K, simply because undergraduate aid has not been re-entered in e-billing. (Why are these manual processes, again?)
Half a dozen e-billing status changes later, the school decides, no, actually, we owe the student money. They notify them that reimbursement will be sent soon. The student is more confused than ever — the school’s now charging them graduate tuition, but giving them undergraduate aid. None of this seems correct.
Of course, it wasn’t. Almost as soon as the refunds were processed, they were informed that nope, the school was wrong, they need to return their previously-refunded funds, because they’re ACTUALLY a graduate student. Oh, and they owe the school around $6K. This news came five weeks into the semester. The student managed to resolve the issue in the end, but not without a six-week logistical nightmare, juggling between talking to the registrar, office of undergrad, and offices of financial aid in turn.
At its core, this is a transparency problem, plain and simple. No one is saying Stevens’ doesn’t have the right to charge students appropriately, as their status changes. BUT: Stevens doesn’t tell its students what they’ll owe and when in a timely, honest fashion. They just assume (incorrectly) that they’ll figure it out. These offices that are so central to student life here — Registrar and Undergrad and Financial Aid and Student Accounts — don’t talk to each other. Or at least, not enough. Finally, the systems used to tabulate and keep track of student info are surprisingly manual and outdated for a supposed ‘Institute of Technology’. Students don’t have easy access to their own information, and the backend is just as murky. All of this has led to problems in getting such matters resolved quickly and sensibly — and the hellscape is only going to get worse if Stevens doesn’t make changes to fix things. Else, we’re just going to see more incompetence on the rise. And if Stevens wants to indeed be a ‘University on the Rise’ — and they can be! — they need to follow up with their actions, too.
Be First to Comment