The College Can’t What?

Not to keep griping or anything, but is there some reason a college’s student e-mail system can’t let you automatically forward from the school account to your personal account? It sounds like a small thing, but let’s get real here. Even free accounts can let you do that.

For working people who happen to be students, this is crucial. Forwarding lets you know right away if something is up with your course. Having to go to the site and log in – just in case there is mail -- is just one unnecessarily laborious thing to have to do. And frankly, days go by quickly. With work and family and home care, perhaps parent care, it’s easy to forget what day it is. Checking e-mail may not even make your radar.

Too often, a college may imply that a “responsible” student regularly checks. Here is where older and younger students may diverge.

Younger students, accustomed to obeying authority, may not argue. Older students, who’ve been around the block a bit, are more likely to speak up. “I beg your pardon?” an older student, replete with a mortgage, job, children, grandchildren, spouse, community work, might ask. “You’re trying to teach me responsibility?”

One of my favorite adjunct profs, who achieved his master’s at age 60, encountered a prof in his student days who just didn’t like him. My prof, the student, asked to change classes. The school refused. “Excuse me,” he told them. “But just whom do you think is the customer here? I think you’ve forgotten.”

Some say that this may be one of the ways colleges, through their institutional ways, target their efforts toward younger students over older ones. I’m not sure that’s the case. More likely, they are slow to change, and cheap.

Colleges provide a service. Students purchase – that’s a key word – those services. Colleges have routines and reputations and such that sometimes make them do ridiculous things. But many students want value for their money, and they aren’t likely to accept any line handed to them by self-appointed authorities.

Which is why when a college says it can’t allow us to forward email, for “security” reasons, we know that that is horse hockey. I would suggest that, because other colleges allow forwarding for students’ convenience, and I suspect this particular institution is just being cheap. If a college wants to invest in online learning, truly invest. Don’t nickel and dime it to death.

And remember students, if you learn nothing else at college, you will learn pretty quickly exactly how much you spend. Understand that you are the customer. Demand the best.