HUB stumbles on start of semester

At the beginning of every year, one of the familiar back-to-school rituals for Carnegie Mellon students is standing in long lines at the HUB. This year, long lines were not the only frustrations that greeted students.

“They charged me a late fee and I haven’t even signed up for classes,” said Salim Mawani, a masters student in information systems management. He said that the HUB thought he was a full-time student even though he had sent them an e-mail saying that he was a part-time student and therefore should not be billed for full tuition. Like other students, Mawani also found the lines at the HUB to be aggravating.

“I think the problem here is that I had to wait here 30 minutes,” said Mawani.

“Sometimes they’re rather misinformative about things you need to do,” said Ben Magallon, an anthropology junior who had initially been told his account would be balanced, but was recently told that he still owes $2500.

During the first and second weeks of classes, students were unable to get refund checks due to a glitch in the computer systems. A sign posted outside The HUB stated that refund checks were temporarily unavailable. According to Linda Anderson and John Papinchak, co-directors of Enrollment Services, the software that automatically issues refunds was modified during the first week of classes. However, the new code had problems, prompting Enrollment Services to stop issuance of refund checks for three days.

The software system controlling refund checks is programmed to issue checks whenever a student’s account has a credit balance and meets certain criteria.

“The process takes into account federal regulations, loan regulations, cash management, and audit regulations,” said Anderson. The modifications to the software were designed to relax the restrictions on automatic issuance of refund checks to allow more students to get checks without going to The HUB to request them.

“We were trying to expand the pool so more students would get automatic refund checks,” said Papinchak. According to Anderson, between 7500 and 8000 checks are issued in the first two weeks of the school year. Some students are issued multiple checks because they may have credits from scholarships or loans that post at different times after the school year begins. The automatic refund system has been in place since March 2002.

Enrollment Services has received additional questions from students in the past several months regarding the student health insurance charge. Information was sent to students and was available on The HUB website. Enrollment Services also increased the maximum allowable outstanding account balance at which a student can enroll in classes to $814, the amount of the health insurance charge. This helped students avoid losing enrollment status if they forgot to have the insurance charge waived.

Some students were incorrectly charged a CampusXpress activation fee even though they had already joined the program in a previous year. According to Papinchak and Anderson, a new CampusXpress billing system was put in place over the summer. However, upgrading to the new system caused the records of students’ past enrollment in CampusXpress to get left behind in the old system.

As a result, some students were mistakenly charged a $15 CampusXpress activation fee. The HUB assistant directors have been entering refunds for students who were incorrectly charged, and the records from the previous system have now been added to the new one.

Despite glitches, most students are satisfied with the service at The HUB.

“The people in general try their best to help you. They’re very flexible towards the students,” said Jenny Cheng, a junior in biology.

“I think they’re pretty helpful, just the lines are pretty long,” said Ariel Levavi, sophomore in mathematics. To help with the early semester rush, The HUB had a separate line for students picking up refund checks.

Enrollment Services is working on several initiatives to offer more services online. They hope to eventually allow direct deposit or on-campus mailing of student refund checks. However, it will be at least a year before all the issues can be worked out and the new changes put into effect. They would also like to offer online ordering of official transcripts so that students would not have to go to The HUB to order transcripts.