Grr. I am blessed with the smart but scattered DS. Just made last-minute late tuition payment. This is a kid who took a gap year and is attending the local state school. living off campus, so parents were never involved in the whole moving in, attending orientation stuff. To top it off, my kid qualifies for free tuition, but the school hasn’t recorded it. So I’m forced to pay 75% more than I need to. There’s that, plus unnecessary fees involved:
(Secondary vent: You think I would know better, but then theres’ the 18+ parents dont have access to account crap!) Who the heck is paying???
$ 50 to take up a payment plan
$ ? for late fees
$ 12 for going below average daily balance in our checking account.
You need to contact the school and find out the process for giving you access to the Bursar account. Your student will have to give you permission (by signing a form or giving online consent). Tell your son that if he doesn’t grant permission for you to view the account, you aren’t paying.
“You need to contact the school and find out the process for giving you access to the Bursar account. Your student will have to give you permission (by signing a form or giving online consent). Tell your son that if he doesn’t grant permission for you to view the account, you aren’t paying.”
Ehhh we skip this whole nonsense and had our kids give us THEIR log in info. We log in as them to pay bills. So much simpler and easier. My kids were greatful we were paying and never gave it a second thought.
My daughter filled out the FERPA thing to give us access to the finances and her final semester grades. She also filled out the HIPPA forms at the the health clinic so they would talk to us.
I agree with the other poster who said to bill your kid for the fees. Totally unacceptable in my book.
@maya54 That’s probably against school policy. We received a notice that parents must have a separate account; the college records IP addresses for security, and if multiple logins are detected on the student’s account, the account will be frozen. It’s easy to have the student grant access to a parent … it took my son all of 5 minutes.
Our kids gave us a special guest log in as well. It worked perfectly so we could pay bills and nudge them if we happened to notice unmet grad requirements.
@maya54 That’s probably against school policy. We received a notice that parents must have a separate account; the college records IP addresses for security, and if multiple logins are detected on the student’s account, the account will be frozen. It’s easy to have the student grant access to a parent … it took my son all of 5 minutes.
Have done if for 8 years at 4 different universities ( each went to a summer program elsewhere) No issues. So much simpler and easier when kids wanted me to look at something for them when they were traveling or didn’t have internet access.
I don’t stop at stop signs when driving my car and haven’t been caught by the police. If the police aren’t around to catch you, then it must be legal. :))
@ilovebillyjoel - Even though you don’t want to ride herd on this kid, you are going to have to for a bit longer. Stay nosey. There should have been parent orientation for you even at a local U. Both our local community college and the local U our DD transfered to had parent orientation sessions.
I let slip that I had D’s login info when I was trying to sort out a billing issue. The person I was talking to said nothing to me but went through her chain of command to send a strongly worded email to D saying that it is against school policy to share login info. During finals. D called me immediately, extremely distressed. I doubt she’s changed her password, but I haven’t tried it. I now go through the poorly designed unintuitive convoluted multiscreen bill payer login.
A law and a private company’s rules have nothing in common. We refuse to play the schools game on this one because the parent portal was too cumbersome. I do however do a full non-rolling stop at ever single stop sign!
And I follow all rules that in any way have an effect on other people.
I willfully used the parent portal until I discovered it was a separate ‘billing’ system and the whole website made no sense. The numbers and postings never matched up. For example, if kid loses dorm key or something, the $25 key fee never shows up on the tuition billling system. Then D would suddenly get an email charging a late fee of $100 because the $25 did not get paid because she never bothered to look at student account because Mom was paying for it. It was a total mess.
Guess who gave up and had to resort to logging in with D’s user IDand login.
I had access through the parent login. S must have signed for us to see the accounts.
I do not remember much about that. One day I did discover that he had not taken care or told
us to check and he could not sign up for his classes due to a bill not paid. He called the financial office
and got nowhere. (I am sure just went through the motions)
I then called the head of the financial office and told him I did not want information (I basically had it)
and explained my S’s half *** efforts to resolve the issue. Small school–guy said, " I will call him and I
will deal with him". It was great. Goal was met and he graduated. Now 28 and a different young man
completely. D would never had allowed these problems. S just needed another bunch of years to mature.
But it was sure frustrating!
I’m sorry! I have a kid like that yours. Freshman year he almost missed registration for classes and we almost paid late because he was asleep at the wheel. The good news is he woke up. (Turned out there was a way for the school to nudge us about payments being due, not to mention that I printed out and posted the payment schedule.)
It really depends on the school. DD1’s school had a payment system where she had to invite us by email to set up access under our own email addresses, but there was no way to do so for her grades. DD2’s school doesn’t have anything set up for parental access - it is done directly through the student account. The presumption is that if the student didn’t want you to have access through their account, the student wouldn’t give you the login information, or would change their password.