Bill Leaves Students Wondering How To Avoid Council Fee

Students looking to opt out of the Undergraduate Council fee on the electronic termbill delivered to their inboxes this week would be at a loss.

While the main page of the electronic termbill boasts instructions on how to waive health fees, any mention of the council’s fee being optional remains tucked away in a separate PDF file labeled “Student Billing Tips.”

But both the tip sheet and the termbill fail to tell students how to opt-out of the council’s fee.

After the heated debate that surrounded the student referendum proposing an increase in the student activities fee this April, waiving the council’s fee had become a much-touted alternative for those who opposed the fee hike.

“That means it needs to be a real option,” said former council representative Joshua A. Barro ’05, who opposed the fee increase.

For his part, council President Matthew W. Mahan ’05 expressed surprise that not even an asterisk indicated that the fee was optional.

“I have stressed to them that the fee is opt-out and therefore students obviously need a method for making the decision to withhold funding if they so desire,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Again, I do not understand why the new e-bill does not reflect the content of the paper bill. It is absolutely unacceptable that an optional fee—any optional fee—be presented as a required payment.”

The Student Receivables Office (SRO) attributed the oversight to lack of technological know-how.

“There wasn’t a vehicle electronically to put a check-box,” said SRO student billing supervisor Mary Jo Keaney.

While Barro said SRO is accommodating, he disagreed about the electronic feasibility of such a task.

“Harvard has 19 billion dollars,” he said. “They can figure out how to put a check-box on a web poll.”

But because students received both a paper bill and an electronic bill this year, the paper bill, which features a check box, would have informed students that the council’s fee was optional, Keaney said.

“We thought that covered all the bases,” Keaney said. “We thought we were giving them the option of waiving the UC fee [in sending out paper and electronic bills].”

But council representative Joseph R. Oliveri ’05, who also opposed the fee increase, pointed to a potential snag in this logic.

“No one would think that there would be discrepancies between both versions of the bill, so many students, I believe, will not check both—they will simply rely on one or the other,” he wrote in an e-mail.

And Barro said that because the e-mail alerting students to the e-bill doesn’t specify that a paper bill would also be sent out, a good number of students would likely choose to pay online.

“Wherever a student might pay his termbill fee or wherever a student’s parents might pay the termbill fee, they should be clearly told that they have the option of opting out,” he said.

For Stephanie R. Camaglia ’07, the electronic termbill brought some confusion.

“I knew that one of the fees was optional, or thought it was, but since it didn’t say so on the bill, I assumed that either it was no longer optional or we weren’t charged that fee yet,” she said.

But Keaney later noted that the bill’s lack of information has not stopped many students from already opting out, many of whom acquired the requisite directions via House open lists.

“There were many e-mails to our office over the weekend from students requesting...to waive the [council] fee,” she wrote in an e-mail. “These students linked to us from the e-bill and all requests were honored.”

And while Mahan acknowledged that the council has “limited ability to tell [the billing office] how to construct their bill,” he said that the council would work to guarantee that the student activities fee be optional in practice.

Keaney added that the SRO would take measures to provide more clear instructions.

“In the future, when paper bills are no longer generated in conjunction with [electronic] bills, we will take care to make sure that students know how to waive the [council’s] fee,” she wrote.

Students can e-mail student_billing@harvard.edu or call the SRO to opt out of the council fee.

—Staff writer Margaret W. Ho can be reached at mwho@fas.harvard.edu.