Note: The students quoted in the article have been given pseudonyms to protect their identities.
Among its various responsibilities, the Carleton Business Office ensures that students make their payments on time, such as tuition, health insurance and Student Health and Counseling (SHAC) charges. To do this, they threaten to, and often do, put students’ accounts on hold, preventing them from registering for classes at appropriate times. For many lower-income and first-generation students, these registration holds become a routine frustration, whether they make their payments on time or not. Faced with intimidating, confusing and inconsistent procedures, some students have come to question the integrity not only of the Office, but of Carleton’s administration as a whole. The system must be reformed so that rules are more consistently and clearly enforced, and so students can navigate the payment system without being punished for misunderstanding arcane rules.
Under the present system, lower-income students often receive notice of massive charges early in their time at Carleton, sometimes even before their first day as students. The following are a few of the many stories I’ve heard from people who were mistreated by the Business Office.
As he entered New Student Week, Aaron was mysteriously charged the full cost of attendance for the term — roughly $30,000. He is on the maximum Financial Aid plan, so when he saw the charge, Aaron got scared. And the emails kept coming. He worried whether he could attend Carleton at all.
“I’m just completely melancholy about it, thinking, ‘Wow, I’m here, and I’m having a great time, and I’m so excited to be here,’” he said. “But [I wondered,] ‘What’s gonna happen? [Is] someone gonna show up to my door and tell me that I have to leave because I owe this money?’”
After getting the emails, Aaron experienced the first panic attacks of his life. He enrolled with SHAC’s therapy services to deal with the stress, which has lasted to this day. He calls it a “traumatic experience.” After a while he said the Business Office corrected its mistake, removing the charge from his account. But it took too long.
Before Juan’s first day as a Carleton student, the Business Office asked him to submit his health insurance information or enroll for the Carleton-provided plan. All students must complete this process, but Juan had neither an existing insurance plan nor the money to pay for the school-provided one, which costs $2,707, per Carleton’s website.
Juan eventually learned that he could access MNsure, the state of Minnesota’s plan. He was not made aware of this option until he had already sent several emails.
There is a brief paragraph on a SHAC-related webpage about MNsure, but I could not find any direct references in Carleton’s Student Health Insurance information pages.
Applying to MNsure takes time, often several weeks, so Juan needed more time before he could waive his Carleton option. The Business Office gave him a two-week extension to get the plan confirmed, but a week later, they applied the full charge to his account anyway.
During her freshman year, Susan worked two jobs: one in the Language and Dining Center (LDC), and one with Northfield Public Schools through the Center for Community and Civic Engagement (CCCE). Northfield schools follow a different schedule than Carleton, so for the first two weeks of the year, her work had not yet started. Because of this, the Business Office wrongly determined that she would be unable to pay her tuition via Work Study as planned. They froze her account and locked her out of registration, saying they wouldn’t lift the hold until she paid the school $200 out of her own pocket to make up for the deficit. Even when corrected, they refused to budge.
Susan panicked when she received the emails. She didn’t know what the account hold meant, and thought that she would be locked out of Moodle and the other various sites she needed for class on a day-to-day basis. The emails gave her little reason to believe otherwise.
Two terms later, Susan was told she was behind on payments despite having $0 listed as her account balance. Why this happened is still unclear.
Even when the Business Office lifts the holds, the process of appealing them is frustrating. Juan had to “plead” with the Business Office in person to have the insurance charge removed, despite already having been told he had more time a week before.
“The fact that they even placed it in the first place, when they knew that things were getting resolved, was indicative of how much they really didn’t care about the situation that I was in,” he said, “and that they really just wanted me to capitulate and pay the charge so that … they could squeeze more money out of me.”
All three students have adjusted to ignore the emails until registration is approaching. Still, these punitive measures, miscalculations and false promises undermined their faith in Carleton’s administration.
I asked Susan whether she would visit the Business Office if she had a question or concern. “Why would I do that?” she responded. “No, I just ignore them.”
With no trusted option for institutional support, the interviewees have found other ways to deal with the Business Office. Susan quit her job with Northfield Public Schools so she would stop receiving the emails because correcting the Office’s miscalculations wasn’t enough. If a student has to quit their job to avoid unnecessary emails, then Carleton’s system is broken.
There is reason to believe that lower-income students are more likely to have their accounts frozen or charged. The students had their accounts frozen or threatened more often when they were paying tuition via Work Study. Moreover, it can be harder for lower-income students to make the payments on time. Their payments are often much smaller, however; lower-income students are pressured to make payments that account for only a tiny fraction of the endowment.
One wonders why the payments must be enforced through such a punitive measure. When extensions are given but not respected, when accounts are frozen incorrectly, when students are not informed of their options, many people come to believe, for understandable reasons, that the school does not respect them or their needs. The Office claims on its website to provide students with “comfort and support;” it must live up to that promise.
“Honestly, if they just…renewed the system, a lot of people’s gripes with the Business Office would … fall away,” said Aaron. “I think I would have been much more sympathetic to the administration if the first thing I saw from Carleton wasn’t…getting harassed about an overdue balance that wasn’t right.” he added.
The registration-hold system can be overwhelming, particularly for first-years who get vague, hostile-sounding emails. The enforcement mechanism should be more clearly communicated, in a way that makes students feel supported like the Office claims, with room for extensions that will be respected. Repeatedly putting accounts on hold leads people to ignore the emails, not respond to them.
At the same time, the Business Office is only the beginning. There is an institutional culture that leaves many community members feeling isolated and unsupported at Carleton. As students, we should get together and fight for all of us who depend on the administration for money, housing, food and more.