Camosun College has changed its timeline for registration dates and fee deadlines, and if you’re like me, you didn’t find out until people started complaining about it.
In previous years, tuition wasn’t due until after the first week or so of classes. This allowed students to add or drop classes without difficulty. Take the first class of a course and hate it? No problem: just drop the course and find something else.
But this year, the fall fee deadline is August 16. Yes, you read that right: August 16. Three whole weeks before classes have even started. And that’s not even the worst part—students will only get a full refund if they drop a class before classes start.
I understand paying for classes before they begin; what truly confuses me is the fact that we can’t even take the first class to decide if it’s a good fit. If I take the first class and hate it, I’ll only get an 80 percent refund.
If the class is $400, I’ve just lost $80. And that’s a steep price for just one class.
I don’t know about you, but it often takes me one or two classes to see if a class is going to work for me. The class can sound like the best, most interesting, and fitting thing on the planet for me when reading the course description during registration, but maybe the instructor’s teaching style isn’t going to work with my learning style. Maybe the course is actually going to have too much of a workload for me to accommodate. Maybe I thought I needed it and found out that I actually don’t. Maybe I need to pull out of classes because of a family emergency.
Regardless of the reason for the drop, I shouldn’t be fined for doing so. Not within the first week of classes.
Now, I can understand the reasoning behind the change. The old system was often unfair to waitlisters and carried a financial burden to the college. And, to Camosun’s credit, after pressure from the Camosun College Student Society (CCSS), it did compromise and change the policy slightly: now, if you are able to pay at least 50 percent of your course fees by the August 16 deadline, you won’t be auto-removed from your courses. But there’s still work to be done with this.
The supposed purpose of this policy was to equalize student opportunity. But all I see are students facing yet another economic barrier to their education.
I think that students need at least the first week of classes to sort things out. September is a stressful time, and having a week (just five days, it’s all I ask) would make an enormous difference while still being kind to waitlisted students. It’s absolutely ridiculous that these changes were made without student input, and it’s clear that these changes won’t affect students positively. After all, in a survey sent out by the CCSS on July 12, 52.5 percent of students said these changes to the registration dates and fee deadlines affected them very badly. And 52.5 percent is way too high of a percentage for the policy to remain.
Students need the first week of classes to make changes to their schedule without financial burden.
No exceptions. No excuses.