Many students have been wondering what to do with their fresh Pride Card envelopes. The options are laid bare in my How-To guide. Other questions are in the FAQ. If you’ve got any concerns, you can voice them here, or check the facebook group.

I got some of the electronic documents from UND I asked for. Of particular interest I saw the various banks bandy about questions with UND. It gives some insight as to what the banks offer, and what UND was thinking about over the course of its search. Of particular note is how UND sought to snowball the mistake it made choosing TouchNet (which does not take Visa) into this subsequent bidding process by insisting on a MasterCard pay card.

And in these documents, whole new realms of questions come to light. US Bank goes so far to say that MasterCard is less secure than Visa. If that’s true (and not just fearmongering out of self-interest), then everyone activating the Pride Card is putting themselves at more risk than the comparable Visa Check Cards issued at our hometown banks.

Anyway, on to the docs:

UND’s original request for proposals
Candidate banks at start
Candidate banks towards the end

UND’s questions for Wells Fargo (response)
UND’s questions for US Bank (response 1, response 2)
UND’s questions for HigherOne (response)

UND’s FAQ for the banks
Final award letter to HigherOne

You wouldn’t believe what you have to go through to get open records in this state.

Today, I trudged through the rain, my coat slung over my computer equipment, just to scan some documents.   I marched back from the UND Counsel office with a small number of scanned files, which I will now share with you.

This is just some of the more interesting documents.   I’ve been promised electronic versions of the others I want.   Most interestingly, there was one e-mail where the names of a few participants were blanked out. Pretty stiff redaction for such an otherwise unnotable document.

As an added bonus, if you click here, you can listen to the meeting UND Finance held with me and two other student representatives, Tyrone Grandstand and Mardy Berlinger.

Now, onto the docs! (Download them all in a ZIP file)

Internal questions, Internal answer

Legal review: Pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,

Working version of contract: Pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

Redacted e-mail

RFP intentions of local banks:Bank Forward, Alerus, Bremer, Bank of North Dakota

Bank of North Dakota letter

We live in a society where government is theoretically transparent and accountable. This is not the society the University of North Dakota participates in. Instead of freely admitting public records for public inspection, they call their lawyers. Their lawyers charge you everything they’re legally allowed to without a second thought.

This gets ridiculous. Despite my rather specifically worded request that I did not want paper copies, apparently no one at the University keeps or knows how to transmit their electronic records in an electronic form. I am told that every e-mail and other document related to the bid that HigherOne won was printed out and placed into five envelopes for legal review before possible release.

Five envelopes, each containing (I am told) 90 billable minutes of legal work to process. $12.50 for the first one and up to $37.50 for the others, depending on how vindictive UND is feeling. I’m supposed to pay this just to find out what a public agency did with public time and funds?

I get to look at the first envelope today, after three weeks of asking, because first Finance dawdled, and then the legal staff took a whole half week off. It was only on Monday that I got a phone number to call. No office number, no e-mail address, just a phone number. And finally when I call today, they’re going out of the office for lunch, they won’t let me take the documents to Student Government for scanning, and I have to wait some more, then lug twenty pounds of computer equipment across campus to get the electronic documents I wanted in the first place.

Nothing I have seen so far indicates any willingness of the University to satisfy student interests beyond the minimum required by law. Don’t they owe us more than that?

The most shocking new development in the Pride Card story is that despite Finance’s statements otherwise, HigherOne does not have an online form to accept direct deposit information, and requires paperwork to be mailed in to get money sent to a student’s own bank account.

Chew on that for a while.   The gloried all-online work elimination system Finance plotted on has collapsed in a puff of Connecticut-based greed — the online system is just a vehicle for HigherOne to sell you services you don’t need.

The easy solution for most UND students is simply to wait 3 weeks after the semester starts and get a cheque mailed to them.   If the Pride Card made it to your door, the cheque will too.   I don’t see why I need to put any effort into dealing with online harassment.   But get ready for the robo-calls, kids: They’re going to try to talk it up, and it’s going to be ugly.

I had the opportunity to speak with the administration at UND Finance today. It wasn’t a bad meeting, and they were all very nice people.

They said they want to have a system that works for students. They’re renovating Twamley and changing their philosophy to focus on direct interaction with students, solving problems quickly and in one spot instead of bouncing them around Twamley.

It’s a good idea which really doesn’t have to have anything to do with the way they process their financial aid — but it seems to be tied together in their minds. Their hope is that by pushing off disbursement processing (which mostly consists of basic office work like tracking down addresses, phone numbers, and bank numbers for students that have not received their aid) they’ll free up man-hours that can be directed toward the new student service approach.

While HigherOne looks like a plus for Finance, which gets a lower workload for next to nothing, students are stuck with a new payment system which will have them filing new paperwork, keeping another document secure, hoping no one between here and Connecticut misplaces their personal data, and probably taking a lot more customer service hours out of the Finance office, whose time was supposed to be freed by this idea.

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UND’s response to student concerns about the so-called “Pride Card” has been slow and brimming with half-truths. They told a couple whoppers in the WDAZ story, but the worst of it was an “FAQ” e-mail that Student Account Services sent out today telling students, in defiance of their privacy rights, that there was no alternative and no recourse. This is despite the fact that it’s already come out into the open that UND is required to issue cheques for excess aid if students do not activate the card — something that large numbers of students are now committing to do.

As mentioned before, card activation is a daunting process involving virtually all the documents you’d need to open up a real bank account. Why should students be forced to jump through that hoop when they already have direct deposit? And don’t even get me started again on the debit card option. It probably sounds nifty-cool and groovy to 40-something bureaucrats, but nobody our age needs an extra MasterCard, and no one who looked at the fee schedule for the thing would ever take HigherOne up on it.

I find myself having to repeat the same points over and over as UND spins the same half-truths. The point that really bothered me in the WDAZ story is that SAS actually said that HigherOne will be storing our information on “secure” servers. Great. So instead of just one copy of my data to be thieved on, there’s two.

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.