<p>
No, that’s humanity, Dude. :)</p>
<p>Ever since our ancestors moved from hunting and gathering to agrarian villages about 10,000 years ago, this kind of stuff has been part of the universal human experience to one degree or another. Franz Kafka, anyone?</p>
<p>And regarding those Student Activities Council rules–aren’t those established and administered by the members of SAC; i.e., students? You can’t blame the Penn administration for that. :)</p>
<p>By the way, if it makes you feel any better ;), the current rule apparently is that failing to attend two meetings in an academic year results in disciplinary action (denial of funding) for that organization:</p>
<p>[Attendance</a> Policy](<a href=“http://sacfunded.net/policies/attendance-policy/]Attendance”>http://sacfunded.net/policies/attendance-policy/)</p>
<p>And again, that’s a rule promulgated by the student members of SAC, and not the Penn administration.</p>
<p>Bottom line: can Penn be a bureaucratic and cumbersome institution at times? Without a doubt. Is it worse in that regard than educational institutions of comparable size and stature? I haven’t seen or heard any hard evidence of that.</p>
<p>It may be a problem of larger schools, but it’s still a problem for Penn, and it’s a problem not really shared by other top schools as far as I know (although I can’t speak for large institutions like Cornell). If you want to learn how to deal with bureaucracy all day, there are cheaper ways to do it that don’t involve $50k+/yr institutions. I didn’t envision myself going to college only to battle the administrative barriers all day long.</p>
<p>45 Percenter: It can be worse in the sense that Penn is far more expensive. Therefore, bureaucracy that revolves around finances is much more intense, and the chain reactions it causes can be impossible to overcome.</p>
<p>^ I understand, Max, and certainly don’t mean to minimize the difficulties you encountered. But as you’ve already pointed out, your issues were somewhat atypical for Penn undergrads, and presumably would not be a problem for the vast majority of students on financial aid. Is that not correct?</p>
<p>Well, they wouldn’t be atypical for students in similar situations (unsupported student + financial aid slashed). It’s just that most students tend to have some form of support net and so by that, alone, it’s atypical.</p>
<p>Penn was far, far, far more responsive to students who had some degree of clout behind them. For instance, I could name you one kid in particular whose father’s influence and wealth was enough to justify having thousands of dollars hacked off some expense the kid had racked up. Someone like me has absolutely no leverage in that kind of negotiation. I’d get hit with a bill and try to knock off what I could out of pocket from work, or put the rest into a loan if I could get it, but whatever spilled out past that I’d have to try to negotiate. If I couldn’t negotiate in time, I’d be placed on financial hold, which meant your status as a student is effectively frozen and you can’t do a thing. It’s impossible to buy books or register for classes or access certain interfaces or leverage your student account, etc. By the time you get something figured out, classes have already started and you have to play catchup, etc etc etc. It’s just a neverending cycle.</p>
<p>I probably should have transferred (but even this, at the time, was infeasible and expensive), but I felt like the one who needed to change was Penn, not me. I was a top applicant who got into multiple Ivies and had perfect marks across the board coming out of a broken family, first gen – there was no way in hell I was going to sacrifice that lifetime accomplishment. On some level, perhaps I felt that a top institution like Penn should have cut me a bit of slack and help me figure out a way to finance everything instead of just shrugging their shoulders at me every time I asked a question. Sometimes I’d get hit with the weirdest errors and penalties (the more blatant being a charge for $100 for not returning a cart within the hour allotted when I had taken it out for maybe a grand total of 10 minutes – but nope, couldn’t get it removed, even though I told them to just check the cameras). It was ridiculous, and there’s no other word for it.</p>
<p>It’s just not what I expected from a top school at all. </p>
<p>Sorry for the rant but I obviously have major gripes with the way I was treated there.</p>
<p>^ It sounds like the root of much of this was your financial aid being slashed, as you put it (for whatever reason that occurred). That’s a very unusual situation. Penn has been raising its annual financial aid budget by tens of millions of dollars over the past few years, and at least $350 million of the ongoing Making History capital campaign is committed to further increasing undergraduate finanical aid. I know from personal experience as an alum that increasing undergraduate financial aid is one of the most important priorities of Penn’s fundraising (Amy Gutmann seems to talk about it more than anything else at alumni events).</p>
<p>So hopefully, your personal experience has become even more atypical than it was when you were there a few years ago.</p>