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More than a quarter of American colleges are now charging processing fees to students who pay their tuition with credit cards, and the practice is becoming more common.
Colleges typically pay credit card companies a 2% fee to handle such transactions, and with budgets shrinking, they are increasingly passing those fees — along with a surcharge, in some cases — on to students.
Virginia’s George Mason University, where half of all students pay by credit card, is imposing a new 2.75% fee for credit card use. The university’s controller expects that the change will produce revenue of $1.5 million a year.
July 14 update: Now comes word (from @globecampus on Twitter) that some Canadian students are banning such transactions entirely. As of September, Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia will prohibit the use of credit cards for tuition payments, in a move that may generate as much as $1 million in annual savings.
“The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation.”
–Pearl S. Buck
A group of Florida teenagers has brought suit against the city of West Palm Beach, in hopes of overturning that city’s youth curfew.
The National Youth Rights Association of Southeast Florida (NYRA-SEFL) filed the lawsuit in federal court late last month, after their efforts to negotiate with the city were rebuffed.
According to the executive director of the national NYRA, this lawsuit is the first formal legal challenge to a curfew ordinance ever brought by a youth-led youth civil rights group.
Afternoon update: Here’s a copy of the complaint.
An Arkansas teenager and her mother are suing a private Christian high school over the treatment the daughter received when school officials learned she was pregnant.
According to the lawsuit, officials at Trinity Christian School badgered the teen into admitting her pregnancy, then expelled her on the spot with only eleven days remaining in the school year. After telling the student (who is not named in public court documents) that she was being expelled, school officials escorted her to a Christian pregnancy crisis center, where she was administered a pregnancy test and given counseling. Staff at the crisis center then shared information about the student with the school.
At no point during their questioning of the student or the trip to the crisis center did school officials contact the student’s mother.
The lawsuit charges race and gender discrimination as well as false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The suit claims that other students who were known by the school to have engaged in sexual activity were not expelled.
A group of alumni plan to purchase and reopen Antioch College, a 150-year-old private Ohio college with a radical history.
Antioch, the flagship of the six-campus Antioch University system, closed two years ago, but now the alumni group has struck a deal with AU’s board of trustees to buy the campus, its endowment, and the rights to its name for $6 million.
The deal, which has to be approved by Ohio state officials, would allow the college to reopen as an independent institution. The alumni group plans to start small, with an annual budget of $4.5 million and an enrollment of just seventy students in the first year of operations, and they hope to admit their first new students in the fall of 2011.
studentactivism.net 
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