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HigherOne’s contract with UND (see it here) has severe clawbacks in the favour of HigherOne.  $25 to 50 thousand if the contract is cancelled before the system is deployed.  Up to $1 per active card if the system processes less than 90% of student aid (which could total as much as $320,000).

UND has risked all this on the untested notion that its financial aid disbursement officers will be able to be used elsewhere.  This begs the question of what, if anything, they will be doing instead, and whether the benefit exceeds the hundreds of thousands of dollars it has laid on the line.

The real chink in the armour, however, is the new federal law.   Even HigherOne admits that it requires students to consent to the debit card system. We don’t consent.  So why is Student Account Services ignoring us?  Does it always take a lawsuit to make the University listen?

It’s hard to fight a battle against the bureaucracy when its full weight is crushing down on you all at once.

Student Account Services, thus far, has ignored and turned away dozens of students seeking to opt out of the “Pride Card” and publicly stated they have no intention of heeding their wishes.

It’s not exactly what you want to deal with while you’re cramming for your final exams. I’m slowly getting to the grimy bottom of this. But there’s a whole lot of ground to cover still, and for all intents and purposes, time has already run out.

One thing is clear: The “Pride Card” doesn’t do anything all that new, and it’s not going to speed up aid disbursements noticeably — except for those students who wanted their money straight up. And until folks with some legal know-how come to bat, it seems students will have to suffer through it for at least a year.

It’s nothing new for HigherOne to surprise student bodies with their scheme. At Portland State, they got their claws in before students could even protest, and even after students did just that, he university still renewed their contract.

University bureaucracies are a particularly easy mark. It starts with accounting bureaucrats who would love to have someone else do the work for them. HigherOne offers to do it for free. Then the accounting service, in concert with this corporation, merrily traipse through the cornfield of minimalist regulation that all student governments are at heart. And HigherOne gets their two percent.

Apparently, there is no kickback scheme at Portland State — and so it’s probably the same here at UND. So we’re getting scammed at twice the rate now. Goody.

The Pride Card story just keeps deepening. After consulting with those people I know, and who have spoken out since the story broke, it seems this slid by Student Government with nothing more than a debate over what picture best represented the campus. And they say the days of policy wonks are over.

The capriciousness the university powers-that-be exhibited in approving this contract now has a downfall: If just 10% of students decline to participate, UND will be charged monthly penalties against all the accounts. Now why would the University ever agree to a term like that, unless it expects to make more money from the program than the $120,000 it would risk?

That is assuming of course, the risks were considered in the first place.

Students walk through a minefield of hidden charges and paperwork with the new UND “Pride Card”.  Join the Facebook group against it!

You can get an opt-out form in MS Word, PDF, OpenDocument, or ASCII Text.

The “Pride Card” decreases options and increases paperwork.

Students cannot get a cheque for their excess aid.  The most flexibility the new system allows for is direct deposit to another bank account.  Students who previously received their aid by direct deposit will have to do the paperwork all over again with the new processing regime.

The new paperwork, plus the additional layer of a bank in between UND and the students increases the delay in receiving funds, which hurts off-campus and aviation students, who have other obligations to take care of at the start of the semester aside from their basic student fees.  The paperwork is primarily available online — which shuts out the technically illiterate and students with certain disabilities.

Students have to keep the debit card on hand even if they never use it, because all future aid disbursements will be tied to the card number instead of their student ID.

The card hides fees and profits from students’ fiscal inexperience.

$2 for any ATM transaction — even balance inquiries, except at terminals run by this foreign bank itself (none exist in North Dakota or Minnesota), on TOP of any other ATM fees charged.  50 cents for any transaction run as “debit” instead of “credit” at the checkout.

The card may not be a credit card, but they certainly don’t mind letting you overdraw your account with a $29 fee for the first time and $35 every time thereafter.  Students, who are notoriously inexperienced with fiscal management, will fall into this trap in large numbers while HigherOne makes a profit.

Students who don’t do anything at all with the debit card will see their disbursement whittled away with $19 monthly fees after 9 months — so if someone gets the memo late, it’s sayonara for their money.

Students have rights that have been ignored.

Students have the right to be secure in their personal financial data.  UND has ignored this and is sharing our names, addresses, and student aid amounts with a foreign company without our prior approval.

While I do not disagree that a debit card is a worthwhile option for students to have, to force everyone to go to the trouble of dealing with this untested new system, and to revoke standing agreements students have made to get their aid by cheque or direct deposit, is unacceptable.  We deserve better.

The University of North Dakota, which last year whined and moaned and finally added surcharges when students pay by credit card, is now flipping the entire system in the other direction.

This fall, UND is only offering students 97% of their excess aid through a “service” called the “UND Pride Card”. In a partnership of dubious legality (I’ll get to that later) with Texas-based Frost Bank, a Connecticut-based organization called “HigherOne” will be handling -in whole or in part- UND’s excess aid disbursement this year.

This disbursement will be meted out primarily, it seems, through Debit MasterCard accounts which HigherOne will collect merchant fees off of. Tally in all the other fees siphoned off by the MasterCard system and you get a service which in effect writes off up to 3% of your student aid into the pockets of foreign banks.

It’d be bad enough if that was the only problem. But given the history of reward credit cards, it would not surprise me if some percentage of that cut ends up right back in UND’s coffers. And that would be highly unethical, to skim yet further off of the students whose fees are already supposed to have been paid.

Whatever the case, it’s increasingly apparent that the University of North Dakota regards its relationship with the Bank of North Dakota as less than the mandate that it is. Grand Forks-based Alerus processes its cheques. Kansas-based TouchNet processes its credit cards. And now another company — and possibly the University itself — will be skimming cream off of excess student aid. Is that legal?

Delta and Northwest are making a deal, which seems to be going ahead despite the lack of consensus among the labour force and regional political leaders. I’m sure Georgia is just tickled pink to have another jewel in the crown of the Empire State, but our neighbours in Minnesota are worried. Moreover, given that Northwest is the major air carrier in North Dakota, we should be concerned as well.  Service cuts are a real possibility in a streamlining new enterprise.

A scrap of boilerplate from the Tribune reveals some rather disturbing news — the health clinic in Hebron is closing.  Hebron is a rather significant industrial centre for our state — I’d hate to think what may happen if emergency care moves farther down the road.

With renewable energy being the wave of the future, it’s important to find innovative ways to refine the biofuels that are going to be powering our economy. In Sioux Falls, they’re recovering methane from a landfill to power an ethanol plant. It’s quite a bit more responsible than some of North Dakota’s recent developments, which burn coal, and thus aren’t very carbon-neutral at all.

Slashdot and Salon are picking up on it — the Internet is abuzz with the potential for the Bakken Formation, which based on conservative estimates, will at least triple US oil reserves.

Now, North Dakotans are a notoriously humble bunch, and in this round of development, we’re liable to be taken advantage of.  What’s our percentage going to be of the tens of trillions of dollars laying beneath our land?

If North Dakota truly is the next Saudi Arabia, it’s high time we took a piece of the pie for ourselves.  Alaska has gargantuan amounts of oil wealth that they’ve kept for themselves — why not do the same for North Dakota?  Why not keep around some of this massive windfall so that we can have money around later when the oil is gone?

Our government, in concert with Montana and Saskatchewan, should ensure that this resource is developed responsibly and that the funds are not squandered.  It’s time to play big.