Arden Kuhn

Review of SDSU

Being the youngest of 13 kids and having my own 2 ...

Being the youngest of 13 kids and having my own 2 kids in college, I have been exposed to many colleges throughout the US. This university is absolutely the worst institution in my experience, in terms of its administrative services. I'm not sure if it has to do with SDSU being a state university that the employees/staff there behave like typical public employees, that they pretty much don't care.
Student Account Services has been the most frustrating for me, especially when my child is an out-of-state student. Should any issue arise, I can't just go there to speak to anyone face to face.
First Semester-Freshmen year: My son told me that his meal plan was suspended because his fees were not paid. According to my bank, the check was sent to the address listed on the website but the payment never got to where it's supposed to go. When I called or when my son stopped by Student Account Services multiple times to check the status of the payment, we were told that the payment could have ended up in one of the offices and that it would be difficult to track the payment. Not once did the university send me or my son a notification via email. While the staff there dragged their feet, my son couldn't eat. The manager of Student Accounts Services was apathetic to say the least. It took a few days to straighten this out while my son was locked out of his meal plan.

Since that disastrous start, I paid via eCheck. Things seemed to be ok until one time my son entered the wrong routing number on the payment. Without any notifications via email, the Portal immediately locked us out of the eCheck option. The only ways to pay was via a wire transfer or credit card. There is no second chance to correct our own error.

Out of State Tuition: The university bills for all sorts of charges, except for out of state tuition. Why is that? Why does the system have to be so bureaucratic?!

We received broadcast messages from the university president, sounding all positive, supportive etc. and that he and his staff care about the students and their experiences at the university. But I'm not buying that. I had contacted him and his staff about my frustrations with Student Account Services but I never heard back from anyone, not even an acknowledge that they had received my email. I didn't expect any of the operations to be changed overnight but it would have been nice if someone at the administrative office acknowledged my email which was sent to at least 5 recipients.

Class registration: computer system is not up-to-date with all prerequisites. For example, if Chem 101 and 102 are prerequisites for Chem 105, the computer system would only accept 101 as the prerequisite. Any students who took chem 102 in this scenario would not get his/her class.

So no...I am not impressed with the administration at all. My son is finishing his junior year. I am looking forward to him graduating from this university so I can finally be rid of these frustrations. There are quite a few other institutions in the San Diego area such as UCSD, USD that are much better than SDSU. I would not recommend this school to people I know.