Transcript Fee: The Saga Continues

Quite a number of things have taken place since the Senate meeting last month where the transcript fee was discussed with Mrs. Yvette Mozie-Ross and Dr. Steve Robinson. A large number of students were in attendance, but for those who were not (or those interested in reviewing the discussion), the official minutes have been posted here.

The plan post-meeting has been for the SGA President to send a letter to President Hrabowski, a move that has been delayed by the recent shifts in SGA's leadership.

Last week, SGA President Gabe Rettaliata sent an official letter to President Hrabowski concerning this fee. At this point, it's been about 2 business days since the letter has been received and we are currently awaiting a response.

Relevant contact information is as follows:

Yvette Mozie-Ross: mozie@umbc.edu
Dr. Steve Robinson: robinsos@umbc.edu
SGA President Gabe Rettaliata: gabriel2@umbc.edu
SGA Speaker of the Senate Rahilla Tarfa: rat1@umbc.edu
Myself: michael.c@umbc.edu

Click here to see all Zwybak posts on this issue.

Public Transcript Fee Discussion

Tonight, the SGA Senate hosted an open discussion with Yvette Mozie-Ross (Vice Provost for Enrollment Management) and Dr. Steve Robinson (Registrar) about the $8 per transcript fee that students are being charged. This is a discussion that has been going on with administrators and SGA members for some time, but tonight involved both SGA members and about forty other concerned students.

I was very excited to see so many students take the time out of their evening to attend this meeting. Their commentary was both insightful and respectful, and those present demonstrated a willingness to work towards some kind of a compromise that would help alleviate the current burden on the student body. At this time, the sentiment of compromise was not reflected in the responses by Mozie-Ross and Robinson.

Because Credentials, Inc. charges only $2 for their transcript processing, many questions were raised by students about where the additional $6 was going. While no budgetary figures were presented by Mozie-Ross and Robinson, one area where money was described as going toward was the development of digital transcripts in a secure .pdf format, that would expire after a certain amount of time.

The minutes from this meeting will be posted as usual on SGA's announcements blog. I'm interested in hearing any further reactions to the meeting from students who had to leave early or were unable to attend.

Finally, it was stated by Mozie-Ross that when the transcript fee was still in the planning stages, she and Robinson consulted with then-SGA president, Jay Lagorio, along with the president of the Graduate Student Association. She said that a $10 fee was proposed to Jay, and after objections were voiced a "compromise" of $8 per transcript was reached.

I took the liberty of contacting Jay myself, and he said he was initially approached about a low per transcript fee that would be under $5. He raised objections to something that high, but agreed that $1-2 would be reasonable to pay for better transcript services (incidentially, $2/transcript is what Credentials charges). Jay also supported the development of a secure .pdf transcript format because that way, graduating students could get a single transcript and use it again and again, since there is no envelope to unseal and a digital signature would verify that the document had not been altered. Clearly, a .pdf with an "expiration date" runs contrary to this idea.

Hopefully this information will resolve any confusion in the minds of students about the role of last year's SGA administration in this process. Contact information for people involved is as follows:

Jay Lagorio: lagorio1@umbc.edu
Yvette Mozie-Ross: mozie@umbc.edu
Dr. Steve Robinson: robinsos@umbc.edu
Gabe Rettaliata (current Speaker of the SGA Senate): gabriel2@umbc.edu
Myself: michael.c@umbc.edu

The Saga of the Transcript Fee

When the SGA sat down at its retreat in August, it outlined five key projects to start the year off with. One of these projects was to investigate the new $8 transcript fee that had gone into effect over the summer. The committee over the past month and half has been very busy looking into it, and has had many interesting experiences and startling revelations.

To start, we did research. UMBC outsourced handling the distribution of our transcripts to Credentials Inc. We looked into the company a bit, but we also looked into transcript fees at other institutions. Our first revelation came in finding out that no other college in the state of Maryland has a transcript fee nearly as high as UMBC. This was disheartening, and we decided to meet with Dr. Nancy Young to find out more about how the decision to allow this fee to pass came to be. During our meeting, we were told that the Registrar’s office had been so busy printing transcripts, that they were unable to focus on services to students. Now that they didn’t have to handle that part of the job, they can focus on those services. We also found out that the fee had originally been proposed at $10, but was knocked down to $8. She informed us that to her knowledge, the fee was only to cover the costs of using Credentials’ services (no money would come back to UMBC to use). Dr. Young told us the Vice Presidents had been shown fees from other universities and all were in a range of $5-$15. They were also told that for someone requesting a transcript, namely alumni, it would not be a burden since they usually only request one. Dr. Young was surprised to find out about the other USM schools, and actually looked up College Park and Ohio State, two of her alma maters, and found they both had very low fees compared to us. She suggested to us to look up the fees at UMBC’s peer institutions (which are colleges across the country similar to UMBC in size and makeup) and to meet with the Registrar, Steve Robinson.

Taking her advice to heart, we did more research. And again we found that of our 10 peer institutions, 3 gave out transcripts for free, and 4 were at $5. Only 3 were as high as or higher than UMBC. Naturally this only fueled our worries about why our fee was so high.

Today we met with Mr. Robinson. He told us about how there was a bidding process for the outsourcing, with Credentials winning. He also told us that there was indeed money coming back to UMBC in a revenue sharing plan. Some of this money would go to offsetting the departments budget problems, some would go to hiring more staff eventually, and the rest would be going to research and development. When we asked the Registrar why UMBC was in such dire straits compared to our peer institutions that we needed such a high fee, he informed us that we shouldn’t compare ourselves to our peers.

We also asked him if there could be alternatives to the current model. When asked if we could have it to where students could use Credentials if they needed those particular services, but could still get transcripts for free at the Office of the Registrar, he told us that would be infeasible, giving a metaphor that if given a choice between free parking on campus and using the meters, people would use the free parking. We also asked him if perhaps we could do method where students could get 3 transcripts for free in a day, and anymore than that could be charged (a method used as other campuses), but he told us that it would be nearly impossible to track that kind of data. In the end, we asked how could he justify having students pay another fee outside of the many fees we already pay for, he told us that we pay for stuff at the Yum Shoppe in the Commons, and this is very similar.

The committee has yet to meet to decide our next course of action. Obviously input from the students that we represent (all of you) would be very helpful, so leave some comments. If you would like to let the Registrar know your feelings on the fee, e-mail him at robinsos@umbc.edu. We plan to continue working on this issue until the problem is resolved.