Well, the Bursar’s office, out of the kindness of their hearts, has decided to call me 3 days before I will be done with my Bachelor’s degree to tell me that I have some unpaid fees which are due by the end of this week, or else I don’t graduate :mad:
Never mind they had all semester to point this out, but didn’t. Never mind that they didn’t say anything when we paid the tuition like we always do. If you were to pay for groceries with a handfull of dollar bills, don’t you think the guy is going to count it out to make sure you have enough money, before you take off with the groceries?
The particular timing of this phone call makes me feel like this is a kind of beurocratic extortion. :mad: Its not the kind of bad news that helps to study for finals.
School admins are not often noted for being timely and helpful. Mere moments before my graduation, I was informed that I was 4 credits short of graduating. Bastards.
They had an interesting solution, however. I had to do 3 book reports on books I never read, and do a final paper on a course I never took. I BSed my way through all of it. They passed me.
Don’t worry, they can still screw you even AFTER you graduate.
When my new employer called my university last week to confirm that I had graduated from there like it said on my application, they claimed I hadn’t!
Lucky for me, the woman calling to confirm had gone to the same school, and knew they probably just fucked up, so she called me to commiserate. If she hadn’t been aware of the school’s reputation for screw-ups, I could have lost the position.
Don’t worry about it, in five years you won’t even remember this happened. It was during my B.S. commencement ceremony that I found out that I wasn’t graduating. I walked accross the stage, shook the deans hand as he handed me my diploma, etc… and when I sat down and opened it there was no diploma. Instead there was a letter saying that they were sorry to inform me but due to blah blah blah…
I think this is typical (though for me it took several months to straighten it out)…
What probably happened, and has happened to me more than once, is that they raised the fees after you paid causing you to owe money. Now you would think they would let it slide considering you were at one time paid in full, but this has never been the case for me. I was trying to get some transcripts sent recently and had the same issue come up.
If it happened right before graduation though, I would be thoroughly pissed, but not at all surprised. I have yet to meet one person who made it all the way through the graduation process without some sort of administrative issues causing major stress no more than a week before. I think it may be a right of passage or something. A final test to make sure your worthy of the coveted diploma perhaps.
At least you didn’t get the notice my wife got after her graduation ceremony. Turns out that her semester long, school organized, workshop in London was, long after the fact, determined to not provide any credits towards her graduation. Therefore, after “graduation” they asked her to come back and spend more money and more time at their school to get a degree.
She told them to cram it. Strangely enough, she still gets requests from the alumni organization for money to support the school. Those are duly crammed as well.
At my school, they would prevent you from graduating if you owed the school any money. So that would include parking tickets and even library fines. Of course, they wouldn’t tell people until a couple of weeks before graduation.
I worked at the front desk at the library, and those were not fun weeks. I saw people come in with fines close to $100 sometimes, extremely frustrated.
Er… does your school not have a way to track the amount of money you have due? Granted this wouldn’t help if any fees are assessed a week before graduation, but in my personal experience among friends, that’s rarely the case. With three friends who graduated last year who were sent notices the week before graduation, they checked online and saw that they had been charged in February for funds due before May graduation.
I think this is what happened. We always try and pay the tuition as soon as possible, and I think the tution went up sometime mid-summer (which means they retroactively bill everybody the difference :mad: ) However, they don’t seem to TELL anybody this. Anyway, I borrowed some money with my mom, and paid the 144 bucks this morning, so everything should be good.
Not sure if this is directed at me, but yes, you could always just ask the Burser’s office whether you owed anything. Most people wouldn’t do that, of course. The way they would typically find out is that you had to take your application for graduation to some office, and they would look it up and say they couldn’t sign it until you paid off your debt. This happened a couple of weeks before graduation, so it really shouldn’t have been a big deal.
And I really had very little sympathy for the people that came into the library with big fines. If you had outstanding late fees, the office would send out a letter every month. Most students seemed to think that they’d just graduate and leave it behind them (even though the notice said that you might not be allowed to graduate if you didn’t pay…) People still got really pissy, as if I was personally trying to screw them out of their diploma. :dubious:
