Wednesday, June 09, 2004

As if I needed more reasons to despise Harvard

Harvard recently announced that it will move to an electronic billing system for students. My initial reaction to this was positive; I pay as many bills as possible online, since it allows me to save on stamps and to pay my bills as they come in and thus makes me less likely to forget them. However, Harvard refuses to send you a paper bill even if you request one - completely ignoring people who pay bills but do not have internet access, either due to age, technological inexperience, or poverty (although undergraduates below a certain level go to Harvard for free now, so this last point is less important than it would have been a year or two ago).

While it's almost certainly a huge cost savings for the university to do away with mailing thousands of paper bills, not having an opt-in request system for paper copies and forcing people to do everything electronically whether they have the hardware or not irks me.

We also don't have grades yet. However, the registrar's office has helpfully added an additional layer of webpages between you and the online schedule request, making my obsessive checking include one more agonizing click-through.
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