| bloodsuckers... |
[Jan. 6th, 2006|11:04 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  pissed off | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Money Make the World Go Round | ] |
A $35 CONVENIENCE fee for charging my tuition to a credit card rather than a checking account debit?!? What kind of freaking overhead do you need to take someone's credit card information over a website? Hrm...every other online vendor does this for FREE. Granted, I know they roll this into their price and operating costs, but this just seems obscene. I'm not even paying for someone with an Indian accent to talk to me on the phone. I'm typing all of the numbers in myself and clicking the buttons. CASHNet SmartPay and Ticketmaster now share their own special circle in my version of the Inferno; it is the immediate vicinity of the usurers.
[/rant] |
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| Comments: |
Appropriately titled post for sure. Convenience for them in fact... I think with credit they get their money faster, don't they?
Multiply that by however many students pay with credit card, and someone is making a great deal of money for not a lot of work. If I were you I'd look into the ethics of that charge--especially if it's a state-run school? May be found illegal if challenged...
The credit payment option is actually through a third party processor, so the University is not profiting off of it. I still think that $35 is a big excessive, even with the surcharges that credit companies charge; the company's overhead is minimal outside of the credit card surcharge. They had two paragraphs on the page explaining what the convenience fee funded, but I still found it not worth the charge and went with the checking account debit instead.
Credit cards give you points/miles/cashback and costs companies a certain percentage of the transaction. Companies would prefer you not use credit cards except they know that people are more likely to spend credit than to write a check or to debit from a checking account.
Yeah, I know the whole 1% rule with using a credit card, but I still found it to be really excessive. I was an apparent pawn in their plot, as I ended up using my checking account instead. The roughly 2,000 frequent flyer miles didn't seem worth the extra $35. It just fries me that they USED to take a credit card for no additional fee, then when I came back to finish grad school, suddenly there's this new fee (not to mention that tuition doubled in my 4 years away).
WOW! I am so glad Oakland doesn't charge that. The amount they are charged per transaction varies based not on the type of card but on the institution it is administered through. I would think they would charge a smaller fee, but I agree, a special circle in inferno is certainly appropriate.
Well, Wayne doesn't actually charge it. See above comment about the third party processor. | |
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