Imagine this: While shopping around for a new television you spot a deal in the newspaper for a nicely priced model. You get to the store and for some reason they don't have what you're looking for but they do have another, much more expensive model.
It's one of the oldest sales frauds there is, the classic bait-and-switch. Simply put, you advertise a great deal that you don't intend on honoring in any way.
Retail is not at all the only area in which this proves to be a shady, albeit useful, technique. Hotels use it to milk more money out of you by charging fees after you book your room.
Apparently, our college also takes part in this.
Back in December, the school sent out an email detailing a tuition hike for out-of-state students, which in itself wasn't the worst thing in the world to do, but how they were doing it was ridiculous.
They were actually applying the hike retroactively to the fall semester that had already taken place.
This harebrained plan wasn't implemented in the end, a welcome relief for many students, but it wasn't out of the kindness of their hearts. No, the administration stopped the retroactive hike because they were too late.
Yes, you read that right. The Administration would have charged out of state students an extra $670 for a semester they already completed and paid for, and in state students an extra $38 fee, but SUNY told them they couldn't.
We should all thank SUNY for doing something in our interest, for once.
Next semester is apparently still fair game, and the $670 jump has been implemented for the current semester. The defense is apparently that we already knew that there would be a fee increase eventually, and that we should have expected it to come.
Freshmen draw the short straw with this deal. They came to this school thinking it was going to be one price, and then in between semesters the price gets bumped up. At least upperclassmen had an inkling that something was coming.
Just because we knew something was on the horizon, however it's unfair for everyone to have his or her education increase in price in the middle of the year. The great majority of us cannot leave; we've contracted to live here for the two semesters and have registered for classes in the spring semester.
Money is obviously important to keeping the school running smoothly, and reasonable tuition hikes are not the problem, as long as it goes to making the school better. The amount charged isn't exactly exorbitant either; it's all about how the changes were implemented. UB decided to do it in the most shady, underhanded way possible.
We're ATM's that can be poked at to give more money instantly when the school needs it. Every year, many of us have decisions to make about the school we attend, and denying us that right by changing the price in the middle of a school year is ridiculous.
If the school wanted to tell us that they unequivocally care more about the almighty dollar than the students they could have at least taken us to the Olive Garden, because most of us like to be wined and dined before we get screwed.
