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The Graduate and Professional Student Association continues to push for restructuring the UNM Bursar’s website.
At a Board of Regents’ Finance and Facilities Committee meeting Friday, GPSA members discussed problems with the website and suggestions on how to make it more comprehensive for students.
In the presentation, GPSA President Priscila Poliana and her colleagues pointed out several problems with the website’s display to the Finance and Facilities Committee by showing committee members “what students see” when they access their accounts.
“The situation we are seeing now is a direct deposit listed as a charge and a loan listed as a payment,” she said.
According to the UNM website, the Bursar’s Office generates bursar account billing statements, answers account inquiries from students, staff and retirees, processes financial aid refunds and processes account payments and departmental deposits.
Poliana also outlined specific issues with the bursar site, including unclear descriptions, the absence of hierarchy of expenses, unexplained codes, a confusing running list of charges and the lack of a per credit-hour rate.
Poliana said she hopes the committee would support a platform that is more “user-friendly,” which can help students understand their charges.
GPSA Executive Assistant James Foty said site improvements should include clear descriptions of the specific breakdown of students’ charges, an explanation of account codes, graphics to help explain charges and links to related information for tuition and fees.
Foty showed the committee a preliminary mock-up of an online Bursar’s Office bill that implemented the GPSA suggestions. He said GPSA’s proposed design of the bill would encourage students to use their accounts and would simplify the site.
“It increases transparency and allows students to make informed decisions,” he said. “It keeps things simple. It doesn’t really add another layer of complexity for students who don’t want to see just more info.”
Justin Whetten, executive ad-hoc committee chair of tuition and fees of GPSA, said the graduate student council spoke to University staff members around campus in order to provide descriptions of fees that are listed on the bursar’s site.
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“We’ve talked with some of the staff around campus, especially from the Bursar’s Office,” he said. “They don’t have access to that kind of information.”
Whetten said in order for a course to charge a fee, the Bursar’s Office needs to explain the reason for the charge to the provost’s office, which then approves the fee.
He said GPSA wants to open up communication between the Bursar’s Office, the provost’s office and LoboWeb, which manages student accounts online, so that the redesigned bursar’s website can provide students with information about their course fees.
“We believe that if students are being charged a fee, it’s because they’re being given access to certain resources,” he said. “As an economics student, I am being charged $25 for a course fee that I wasn’t sure about at first. I found out that the course fee gives me access to certain programs that other students don’t have access to. I’m more likely to use those resources … if I understand that I am already paying for them.”
Once communication opens between the three offices, Whetten said UNM should start “the second level of integration between LoboWeb and the Bursar’s Office.”
“LoboWeb is run by our (Information Technology) department here,” he said. “The Bursar’s Office site is program-controlled by a third-party site called TouchNet. So in order to get these changes made, we need to start with LoboWeb because we can have our IT department start working on that now, and then we have to start communication with that third party, TouchNet, to get the changes made in the bursar’s site.”
Whetten said he feels the redesign for the bursar’s website might happen by the spring semester next year.
“I’ve been speaking with the Bursar’s Office and some of the other staff around campus, and we feel that these implementations that we showed can be implemented by next semester,” he said.
In the meeting, UNM President Robert Frank expressed support for GPSA’s endeavor.
“We will immediately work to implement all of these changes because they are very thoughtfully done,” he said.
Regent Conrad James said the project aligned with some of Provost Chaouki Abdallah’s and President Frank’s goals to improve communication and transparency among members of the University community.
“This is in line with what Chaouki and the president have been working on with regard to providing more information, making sure people understand what’s going on with the University, having this internal information for our students to also maintain transparency,” he said.
