During the summer, the Bursar’s office made available an online payment system that accepts American Express, Mastercard, and Discover cards as well as electronic fund transfers from savings and checking accounts. The online interface can be used to make payments for tuition or any other part of a student’s bursar bill.
Upon visiting the payment website via SIS or by going to http://finance.rpi.edu/bursar, however, students will find a new fee involved in payment if they wish to pay by credit—a 2.5 percent transaction fee charged by the service RPI uses for each transaction done via the system. For a student paying a year’s full tuition via credit card, this would involve a transction fee of $775.
Daniel Maguffin, RPI’s bursar, has fielded a fair amount of questions on the matter since its introduction, mostly from parents unaware of the memo and bill inserts issued last term mentioning the fee. Prior to the online payment system, RPI accepted payments on any money owed via fax for credit cards, in person for checks, credit cards, or cash, or checks and credit cards by mail.
Most of those forms of payment—except for mailing a check or bringing a check or cash in person, have been deprecated in favor of the online system. Maguffin indicated that the online payment system and the decisions surrounding it “were not a simple bursar decision—all interests on the campus, including many administrators, people from finance, and [Student Union Director] Rick Hartt were consulted.” During the committee proceedings, it was decided that RPI did not have the IT security measures necessary to store and process confidential information like credit card and bank information; therefore outsourcing was decided upon.
As for the fee of 2.5 percent, Maguffin explained that “In the past, RPI absorbed the approximately quarter-million dollars that resulted from being changed 2.5 percent on each transaction as well as the time associated with processing credit cards using a very labor-intensive system of charging credit card numbers from faxes, phone calls, and mail.”
The cost of the bank fees is now being passed to the parents or students paying by credit card; Maguffin emphatically indicated that RPI gets no part of the fee whatsoever. He added, a decision was made not to accept Visa online because of the additional heavy fees and other unreasonable terms applied to online payments made with the card. This and other negotiations resulted in the 2.5 percent fee not being higher than it is. Payments can still be made from a checking or savings account at no expense to either RPI or the student.
With regard to the general demographic of people using the system—no data prior to May 2005 is available—Maguffin pointed to no substantive change in the amount of people using electronic fund transfers or credit cards, nor any change in the amounts people are choosing to pay. He said the change has resulted in his staff being able to direct their energies to other office tasks needing attention and the drain on school finances to bank fees is gone.
One student commented on the new fee. Steve Prokopiak ’08 said, “I am flabbergasted at the injustice of this fee being passed on to students.”
