This letter is in response to Thursday’s news story, “Bursar to apply credit card fees for some charges.”

Click here to read Thursday’s news story, “Bursar to apply credit card fees for some charges.”

I was disgusted to see what new form of scam the university has decided to enforce on its students. I say scam because OU is a business, and that’s what businesses do. They scam their customers.

I hate to do it, but I’m going to quote a movie to back up my argument in this article because this movie puts it really well. The movie “Accepted” puts it perfectly when Lewis Black says that college is a service industry as in serve us and frankly that’s what college is supposed to be.

Colleges are consumer industries because the consumers (students) are buying a product (education), so how does it work that the industry can totally scam its customer and yet the customer keeps coming back?

When I see all the scams OU throws at its customers, like the new credit card fees, the new hike in general fees, the general extreme cost of tuition or the absurd cost of textbooks, it makes me wonder how long this industry will be able to stay alive.

In any other industries, when the consumers are unhappy with the product or the means it takes to get the product, they stop buying the product or they get it from somewhere else. And if the university continues to make the consumer unhappy, the consumer will move on to a different university or simply learn to do without the product.

It is getting to the point to where people cannot afford to go to college and yet at the same time in order to get a good job they have to have a college education. So basically the college industry is screwing over its consumer, and it doesn’t seem to care about that small fact too much.

When an industry begins to care more about itself instead of the consumers that keep the industry running you can bet that within time, that industry will cease to exist.

Stefanie Heinrich, letters junior