I was wondering when ASU would seize the opportunity and start screwing students who use credit cards under the guise of "convenience fees." It's the latest, easiest and most passe means of giving customers the shaft: Enable and encourage a certain mode of payment, and then charge them extra for using it.
Starting Nov. 1, ASU will solicit indy company InfiNET to charge a 2.75 percent "convenience fee" for students using their credit cards to pay for anything from tuition to an overdue book at the library. VISA will not even be accepted any longer.
We are customers, have no doubt. We might feel like students and act like students, but we are a predictable and malleable customer base, studied for chinks, pushed and tested as much as teenagers or the elderly.
In typical ASU fashion, the fees go well above the needed amount to make up the supposed $2 million loss. As one graduate student has evinced, raising tuition by as little as $40 could cover the loss, but ASU has ensured a method that will make students pay anywhere from $118 to $382. It's Crow's math at its finest.
Of course, the reason the administration relies on indirect means of generating revenue is so they can perpetually claim tuition is kept as low as possible and that ASU is still an "affordable" university.
The fact is, fewer students would have ever paid by credit card if ASU had whipped out this fee from the start.
It is the way in which ASU is making the change that really insults students. Just like selling us out to Parking and Transit Services, the administration claims they can do nothing to change a contracted business's policies.
Now, because of our new friends at InfiNET, students will not even be able to use the most common credit card type. (VISA wisely refuses to play nice with outside vendors like InfiNET.)
To this, Joanne Wamsley, the director of Business Services, simply says it's out of ASU's hands. Though, this means that most students who have to pay by credit card will not only have to suffer the approximately three percent fee, but will have to open up another line of credit.
How convenient -- soliciting independent companies bent on sodomizing every student and then claiming to have no say in their policies, like not accepting the most ubiquitous credit card in the world. Gee, maybe ASU shouldn't bring them in to begin with.
ASU whines about eating $2 million a year in fees, but it is just like the administration to mention what it is losing and not what it is gaining. Remember when students had to stand in line to pay tuition or when most transactions were paid in checks and not instantly with credit card payments.
What ASU fails to mention is that credit card usage saves them enormous amounts of man hours and gives them the ability to do whatever it is they do with all of that money almost right away. Far fewer bounced checks, online and telephonic payment methods -- this has all saved ASU time, money and inconvenience.
And I have no doubt that InfiNET will have some Guy Smiley spokesperson coddling students and offering them the proverbial KY Jelly by assuring them that InfiNET's outlandish fee helps keep ASU running.
There is massive debate among the graduate community about the legalities of this action, since companies such as MasterCard have clearly defined rules about not allowing businesses, such as ASU, to charge for taking MasterCard. Yet bringing in a company like InfiNET (one whose sustenance is based on the disenfranchisement of an indebted class) will effectively relieve them of this restriction, as well as seemingly clear ASU's conscience of screwing students time after time.
Well here's your reach-around, students: Do not pay the fee. There is always another way of paying that does not entail an almost 3 percent slap in the face on top of the consistently rising tuition of our "New American University."
Thankfully, this is my last semester, as I'll be graduating with an English, or something like it, degree this fall. And while it is easy for me to say that students should find another way to pay for their schooling without the InfiNET fee, I have no guidebook. It is going to take letters and complaints and phone calls and petitions.
And I hope that someone out there organizes a definitive counter effort to what is clearly the future of this business.
But it's out of my hands.
Darren Todd is an English literature graduate student. Tell him ASU is still a good school at lawrence.todd@asu.edu.
