Students Report Banner flaws
Although facilitators say the transition to Utah State University’s administration system, Banner, has been impressively smooth, some international and continuing education students are critical of the system.
Many were assigned two A numbers, with their schedule on one account and their financial aid on the other. Because the two were separated, their financial aid could not be applied to the classes.
“You see the amount of money you owe and you almost faint,” said Yasir Kaheil, a civil engineering graduate student who had a duplicate account.
Kaheil said he had to wait in line many hours, missing several classes, in order to clear up his account. It took about three full days to fix everything, he said.
“The clean-up process is a big project,” said Carl Ellsworth, technical support for the Registrar’s Office. “We can’t just delete the erroneous accounts because it would delete financial information. We have to merge them, and that takes time.”
The Registrar’s Office is aware of the problem and is being careful to not purge students whose financial aid is on a separate account. Although the problem is not completely resolved, students can continue with business as usual. They don’t need to do anything else at this point, Ellsworth said.
“We just need people to be patient,” he said. “Right now we can’t do anything more than give them the right ID, which they can do themselves.”
The duplicate accounts will be deleted by next semester, he said.
For many international students, the problem is connected with the artificial Social Security number (beginning with 888) assigned to them when they arrived at USU, Ellsworth said.
If the student later applied for financial aid from the government using a different social security number, two accounts were created with classes on the 888 number account and financial aid on the other.
Some continuing education students have had trouble because they do not go through the regular application process. The larger percentage of students affected, however, were international students, because of their 888 numbers, Associate Registrar Heidi Beck, said.
Some international students say they are frustrated with the Registrar’s Office. Enrique Rosero, a civil engineering graduate student, said he the office was not helpful.
He said he had to go through three different offices to get things fixed.
“The bottom line is they didn’t think about it. It’s really messy and it’s inconsiderate. It’s symbolic of how international students are treated at this university,” he said.
Despite the duplicate accounts, USU technicians echo that the transition has been very good compared to other universities.
“This process has been a lot more seamless than it has been for other universities. We have had better results than we even expected,” Ellsworth said.
-ashsciller@cc.usu.edu