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July 27, 2006, 02:49 PM ET
High Tech or High Maintenance?
This fall, when Pennsylvania State University starts requiring all tuition bills to be paid online, employees in the campus bursar’s office will undoubtedly have much less paperwork to file. But that doesn’t mean their jobs will get any easier, according to the university’s student newspaper.
In a staff editorial, The Daily Collegian argues that Penn State’s switch to an online-only payment system will create more problems than it solves: What happens if the e-mail notifying you that your semester bill needs to be paid is filtered to spam? What if some parents do not own a computer? What if the confirmation of payment is lost somehow, and parents are left with no proof that the bill was ever paid? Tuition is far too expensive an investment to risk errors of the technical kind.
A question for readers: Does a college owe it to students and parents to slow its switch to higher-tech services? —Brock Read
Categories: Leadership
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