Your school is a business.

College is a lot different from high school – mainly in the financial department. Say goodbye to ten months of free schooling and hello to eight months of schooling with a price tag in the thousands. Yes, gone are the days of a broad education that covers multiple subjects and topics, now you’ve gotta’ pick one thing and stick with it, so let’s hope you get it right the first time.

You see, college is a business no different from any other one:

• It charges you money to access its services.
• It has multiple franchises (read: campuses).
• It has a CEO-type figure (read: dean).
• There are multiple managers (read: teachers).
• You are required to keep these people happy, or they’ll kick you out.
• They even manage to give value packages in the same way a fast food restaurant might!

Allow me to expand on that last point. In the summer between my second and third year, I enrolled in an online general education course (Geopolitics, specifically) to get it out of the way early so I wouldn’t need to worry about it come September (I’m required to take one each semester). This came with a price tag of about $250 plus a $60 text book. Basically all that was included in the course was me logging onto a site, finding what I was supposed to read from the text book, and reading it.

My teacher must’ve been laughing the whole time.

When September finally came along, I went to the registrar to drop the gen-ed that I was scheduled to be taking that semester (since I successfully completed the one from that summer). I was hoping that I could get the $250 refunded because I had taken the same course I would’ve in September, just four months earlier. However, this wasn’t possible. Apparently my tuition doesn’t cover courses taken outside the regular semester schedule (September – April) regardless of whether it’s a program requirement or not!

You see, the school was doing this to keep costs down. They bundle all of the eight courses that I’m required to take each semester into one package, because it’s cheaper than charging for each of them separately. Just like it’s cheaper to buy the burger, fries, and drink than it is to only buy the burger and fries!

How this actually makes sense, I’m not too sure. I was never given a course by course pricing breakdown with the savings I was receiving from them being packaged together, but I did know there was no way I was getting my money back.

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