Letter to the editor
Have you heard that Western Michigan University is taking away the right to pay tuition with Visa and then charging 2.75% for paying with a credit card?
Has anyone noticed how, while they said that money was previously coming out of tuition, they’re not lowering the tuition at all, they’re just taking the extra money and doing whatever with it?
I’m an international graduate student doing my masters at WMU and I only have a Visa to pay the outrageously expensive tuition with.
This is how I’m funding my tuition.
Being halfway through my masters, I can’t go and transfer schools now, but they’ve just made it impossible for me to pay my tuition.
Not only that, but they didn’t even consult any of us about this, they just went and posted something on GoWMU only a couple of weeks before our next bundle of tuition is due (for those of us who are in school every semester).
This must be changed. They can’t go and not allow payment from the largest form of credit card in the world, and I’ve never heard of anyone anywhere transferring the cost of the credit card usage onto the customer.
It’s part and parcel of allowing credit card payments, which you have to allow on purchases like tuition that reach around 12,000$/semester or you won’t have people able to pay.
— Daphne Goold, WMU master’s student
Short URL: http://www.westernherald.com/?p=17952
Posted by HeraldAdmin
on Jun 27 2010. Filed under Letters to the Editor, Opinion.
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I completely agree. This is a ridiculous move. Way to put the extra cost of something onto the students. I just went to pay my Fall tuition via credit card and realized it was going to include an extra $80 fee! This is a joke. I am in your same situation- paying for grad school by credt card … now my only option of avoiding this fee is to pay in cash/check , which for me is not possible.
They are not just disallowing Visa they are disallowing in person credit card payments from every service. Yes they can do this, every organization that sells a good or service has the right to decide which payment forms they are willing to take or add fees to cover any processing costs that go with the method of payment. That cost is always passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices overall. It makes complete sense to make those using methods that require extra costs to take pay for those extra costs instead of making all of us pay a little extra to cover it.
Are they going to lower tuition because of this? Absolutely not, they just aren’t raising it the extra .1% or whatever it would take for everybody to cover the additional cost they are incurring because of you.
So good job WMU for no longer making everybody pay for additional costs incurred by a few.