Universities Hate Working Moms!

Why is it that because I want a real education from a real university and not one of those fake ones you can get from the "online" colleges, that I can't get a little more cooperation and assistance from my school? I'm not talking about hand holding but just something a little less labyrinthine when you're trying to make your way through the maze of requirements, classes, schedules and programs that is commonplace in most higher ed organizations would be great.

My experience, after attending a community college and two state universities, is that if you don't fit in the box they've got for a college student, too bad, so sad! Foolish me, when I first started college, I had dreams of dropping my son off at daycare while I took night classes after work. I was quickly informed that the daycare hours ended at six. Even most of the classes that were held at "night" began an hour or more before I could even leave the office. I think what makes it so annoying is the schools are so self-congratulatory about how flexible and accommodating they are. Ummm, not so much.

Plan B, online classes. Not ideal, but the only option open to me. I managed to make my way through all the general education classes required for my degree. Believe me when I say that biology online has a set of challenges all its own! By the time the choices at the school I was attending had dwindled to almost nothing, I had already decided to shift to another school that would hopefully be a little more challenging. Again, not so much. Oh well.

The new university was great, and the best surprise was the health insurance coverage you automatically were enrolled in if you took over five credits. Since I had a choice at my dinky two person office between having my benefits go toward covering my daycare expenses or towards my health insurance, I hadn't had any coverage for over a year since thanks to the fabulous health options in our wonderfully advanced country.

But my happy happy joy joy moment lasted until I tried to enroll for the insurance over the summer. True to form, there was a clause buried deeply that only certain online classes were counted towards those five or more credits. For my spring term I had inadvertently registered for classes that were considered "self-support" which meant I had not only not had coverage for the last three months unbeknownst to me, but I was also no longer eligible for coverage over the summer. Great.

The university, like most gargantuan institutions, works on the squeaky wheel principle, so when contacting the administrator of the clinic got me no results, I contacted the provost (another weird word only used in universities). That's looking slightly more promising, but in the meantime, the first of the notices from the insurance company have shown up, with a large figure in the "you may be billed this amount" section. ARGHHHHHH!