<p>My son's Student Account's office sent out MasterCard debit cards this fall with the instruction that students MUST fill out a "refund preference". We are told that Student Accounts will "load" the debit card with any refunds from their office that are due. </p>
<p>Well, when S went online, he finds that this debit card is managed by HigherOne Bank in Connecticut and he is supposed to open an account with HigherOne to activate the debit card.</p>
<p>S already has an account at a local, nonprofit credit union that has served our family well. </p>
<p>The HigherOne site says that the student can choose his own checking account (gee, thanks) for university refunds, but FIRST the student must check in with HigherOne by providing name, social security number, and account number from our local credit union. </p>
<p>We're not liking this at all. I wonder if HigherOne has made a payment to our college to gain access to all the students. Can the college force my kid to have a debit card from an out of state bank? Seems crazy.</p>
<p>"Can the college force my kid to have a debit card from an out of state bank? Seems crazy. "
NO.
You need to contact - both email and a phone call- the head of the Bursers office at the college and let them know in no uncertain terms your son will NOT be opening an account or giving confidential information to an outside bank in the unlikely event that a refund is ever due you.</p>
<p>Yes they can. My son’s school did that and he did have to sign up for it to get his refund. We just went into the higher one account and had them transfer the money into his bank account. We never had any problem other than the emails telling him he would have quicker access to his money if he left it in the higher one account. And we just ignored them.</p>
<p>What a horrible message to send students: use our bank and tell our bank all your personal information and trust us and our bank that all will be well. No research. No options. </p>
<p>I think a lot of the students just went with the debit card. My son had had a bank account for years and had rent and bills to pay and had no intention of being stuck with the debit card. Perhaps if more students made the money be transferred into their own accounts organizations that do this would not find it worthwhile. </p>
<p>Maybe it is useful for some students who do not have accounts. My son was dating a girl at the time who had such an awful credit history she could not even open a bank account. So it worked quite well for her.</p>
<p>You should be able to fill out the refund preference form to have all refunds issued in the form of a check. In the case of the university linked below that uses Higher One, this will take 21 days+mailing.</p>
<p>I’m really surprised that they require a SSN to deposit to another account and would definitely call to make sure that doing this would not cause a bank account to be open and that Higher One is not doing a credit check (hard or soft pull) or looking at his ChexSystems report. The data I saw for the above university says that a majority choose the direct deposit to another account option over depositing it into a Higher One account.</p>
<p>As far as I am aware my son’s school did not offer a refund preference form. The card was actually a new thing in his last year. Before that you had to go to the bursars office and pick up a check.</p>
<p>My daughter’s school mails the check, or will pay it direct into her bank account. We go for the mailed check because for the direct deposit you have to agree that they can take money out of the account if they have made a mistake. Not comfortable with that idea. Obviously would repay any money over refunded, but certainly don’t want it withdrawn at a time other that her choosing.</p>
<p>at my son’s school you just fill out a form with your banking info for whatever account you want it deposited to. and they transfer it electronically</p>
<p>Probably depends on the school, but in my experience getting a refund is not at all unlikely. In 2 years I’ve received somewhere between 10 and 15 refunds. Now if I didn’t sign up for direct deposit I would still get mailed checks, but refusing the refunds altogether would’ve meant losing tens of thousands of dollars.</p>
<p>Being forced to use a particular bank may be annoying, but definitely make sure you get the refunds.</p>
<p>I hadn’t thought about the credit check. Yuck. I just don’t like the idea of giving out private information to an out of state bank chosen by someone else. </p>
<p>I also do not like that “choosing another institution” is done by giving information to HigherOne. </p>
<p>I also am not seeing anything where HigherOne promises not to sell student information to other vendors – or promises from HigherOne not to offer other products. As one of my smart guys says “anytime something is offered ‘for free’ it means YOU are the product.”</p>
<p>Actually the “anything something is offered ‘for free’ it means YOU are the product” is a comment made to me by my older son who is a recent graduate with a computer science degree. He may have been quoting some computer guru – so it’s not original to me!</p>
<p>But it’s a lovely thing to put on Facebook. The more kids think about that the safer they will be.</p>
<p>“In two years I’ve received between 10 and 15 refunds”.</p>
<p>Why so many refunds? What am I missing? While we once had to pay an extra $40 for re-keying a door before S1 could check out of his dorm at the end of the year, we’ve never gotten a refund.</p>
<p>I work at a university - there are lots of regulations about refunding and financial data we have to follow. We have not gone the Higher One route, but have discussed it as a possibility. There are rules about how quickly we must do refunds; if we collect direct deposit information there are rules about how it must be stored/handled, etc. </p>
<p>We prefer to do direct deposit; doing printed refund checks requires us to hire people to sit in a location all day and check IDs and hand out checks; when students don’t pick them up and we mail them, we find the students haven’t updated their addresses. Because we have regulations on how quickly we must refund Title IV money, we can be out of compliance.</p>
<p>We use a higher education software product called Evisions, and they integrate with Higher One:</p>
<p>According to their web site, Higher One was founded by college students.</p>
<p>I work at a public institution. We have had our budget slashed every year; we are going on 4 years now with no pay raises for employees. At the same time we have new federal regulations every year that we have to comply with. </p>
<p>I have a D in college (not where I work) - so I experience two sides of the university experience. In my role as an employee, I must say I work with very dedicated colleagues. We try our best to contribute to the best educational experience for the student. It’s disheartening to hear students complain about “lazy and stupid” university employees when we’ve been working 14-15 hour days.</p>
If a student has financial aid that exceeds the school’s direct expenses, then the excess money is paid to them as a “refund”. Both my kids lived off campus, so the only direct school charges were tuition and fees. The excess FA money (which included their student loan money) was refunded to them and they used it toward books, rent etc.</p>