Dear Office of the Registrar,
Imagine a first generation college student, coming into Rutgers University in August, from a three person family living off of a single income. With no prior college experience or history, having all of the financial requirements and everything all set up and taken care of is relatively wishful thinking. With the packing list and stress running marathons through the average freshman’s head, some things can be lost and forgotten about, like paying the term bill. It just so happens to be due before move in day, which is absurd – that is before classes even start! The repercussions to not having it taken care of promptly are ludicrous. On September 26th, 2015, my internet access had been revoked, my Sakai site was removed and I was removed from all of my classes! How do you expect to receive the money from the students by taking away all of their resources needed to take further actions to resolve the issue?
When I first started my freshman year at Rutgers, I was excited, but at the same time, frightened by the many new goals that I had set for myself. Putting myself in debt for years to come was nerve-racking. Classes had just started, and my dad would call me every night to see how I was adapting to the campus, and to see how I was progressing with my roommates. I was falling in love with the idea of being away from home and living with a new group of people and having complete freedom. Then, one day after classes had ended, my dad called me, and had a rather urgent tone. He asked me why he received a bill for more than $8,000. At that moment, my heart started racing. A million and one questions ran through my head. “Am I going to get kicked out of school?” “Am I going to get arrested?” I had genuinely no idea how to respond back to him. He told me to go to the financial office, which I did, to talk about the situation. I was going the next day to take out student loans and resolve the issues that I was having. However, it was brought to my attention that there were prerequisites that needed to be met first. The person who worked there gave me the run around about the whole situation. Their instructions were pitiful and their attitude was poor. I thought that in order to have a job working with students you had to have patience and care, but unfortunately they proved that notion wrong.
Returning to the fact that my Sakai and internet were blocked, how is a student supposed to take care of a crisis without the proper tools and necessities? I was preparing to complete an assignment for my Biology class when I tried to log in to my internet and I was denied. I was baffled at the fact that I was being stripped of such vital assets to not only my education, but being able to pay for my education too.
I began to ask my roommates about their situations and none were in the same shoes as me. A girl across the hall was in the same predicament and was just as frustrated as I was. Removing privileges is wrong. It simply stresses students out and makes them not want to do what is asked of them. About one in every five students that live on campus that I asked about their financial status and term bill, told me that they had their internet access taken away due to being placed on financial hold, or simply not knowing how to take care of their term bill. Personally, I felt as though the university was directly punishing me. However, it turns out that these actions of hostility afflicted nearly twenty percent of on campus students! That is an entirely too high percentage!
Also, when I finally was able to figure out how to take out my loans and they were successfully submitted to Rutgers, I was still unable to get on my internet until about three weeks after. My dad would call the office of financial aid and they would say that the loans were not completed properly, or that they were not submitted at all, which was a lie. I submitted my master promissory note three times before it was recognized. The frustration and anger brought on by this is ridiculous.
Finally, if the term bill is not paid, you are unable to register for classes for the next semester. That is reasonable, but still quite unfair. My roommate is unable to register and has filled out all of the required documents multiple times as well. Something needs to change in the financial department or in the registrar department. It is befuddling to me that it takes so much unnecessary work and effort to find out that you have been doing something correctly the whole semester, yet you’ve been being told otherwise.
In conclusion, in the office of the registrar, something must be changed in response to term bills being unpaid immediately. Perhaps an extension to the due date by about a month or so for freshmen and a few weeks to upperclassmen, would be a better solution, as opposed to smacking a late fine on to the term bill, eventually shutting down internet and Sakai sites, removing them from their classes and preventing further registration for the impending semester. The consequences for not understanding how to take out loans is too steep, especially for freshmen. The thoughts that that puts through our heads is berserk. Dropping out of school is an option that no one wants to take, but when students start falling behind in classes because they can’t study properly or can’t sleep at night because all they can think about is how they might be evicted from their dorm, some kind of action needs to be taken. Please reconsider your actions that you take next semester for late term bills. Maybe next time, the students will not pay them and the school will lose its money.