A thread of the wildest things that have happened in northern #Cyprus universities.

A lot of things on this thread are finance-related. To be clear, I am not against universities seeking to collect monies owed them by students. My contention is with the way and manner these things are done. Just when you think you cant be surprised anymore, the universities go “hold my beer” and find a way to shock you even more.

1. A student had 100% scholarship. Between the department handling the scholarship and the finance department, one didn’t notify the other before the registration period expired. So the student got charged by the school for late registration fees and interests on the debts accrued. 🤦🏾‍♂️

2. Dorms are typically a mess in most Universities, most students (especially from Africa) opt out of the dorms after the first semester. A student who opted out of the dorm lost her 100% scholarship immediately. There was no warning beforehand & no notice after it was done either.

3. One university terminated scholarships for the students in the middle of the lockdown with no notice/ warning to the students beforehand and then started to charge interests on the debts piling up. Most students did not know until months later.

4. A University routinely de-registers and un-enrolls the entire school manually in an attempt to fish out debtors in the middle of midterm exams (because, I suspect, they could not afford better e-learning platforms and/or afford to pay software developers/ coders to integrate the platform to work and restrict access automatically). Then tries to fix it by disabling student individual registrations, then re-enrolls manually and centrally via an administrator. The problem with this method is that lots of students get enrolled in the wrong courses often. (A common error is that some courses have similar course codes but different titles, something that could easily be solved with a lookup function to ascertain your registration via a registry containing your student profile and then updated to that effect but because it is done manually, this error is very common).

5. One university refused to issue certificate to a PhD student because according to them, their accounts department had been giving the wrong fees to the student to pay for the last 2 years (Just 🤦🏾‍♂️) and now they are determined to collect their balance, else no certificate.

6. In some Universities, when you owe rent at the dorms, the uni blocks your student portal until you pay but when the dorms owe you a refund, the Uni would say “they are a different organization”. Needless to say, getting any kind of refund from most Universities is literally impossible.

7. Some Universities charge students “dental insurance” as part of fees even though the students also pay premiums for healthcare and taxes to the govt when obtaining their resident permits every year! 🤣

8. As an intending student, if you tweet or email the uni you applied to, you are not likely to get a response at all because the Universities assume you are coming via an “agent”. If they do respond, the information is barely enough. You are left at the mercy of your “agent”.

9. If you pay for fees in foreign currency (which you are supposed to do), some universities convert that money to the local currency (turkish lira) using their (internal) rates and then convert it back to their preferred currency (Euro) using their own rates. So its usually less. Sigh!

10. One university could not trace the payments records of a student for nearly 2 years. They demanded that the student forfeit that current program (she was in her 3rd yr) and start all over.

11. Some universities have lost original copies of transcripts, certificates, high school results et al belonging to students before they graduated. The students had to replace these documents at personal cost after graduation.

Related: The dubious process of getting enrolled in a university in northern Cyprus.

12. If you have any kind of scholarship in most universities, the school debits you at 0% scholarship first, you then head to registration where someone brings out a calculator to figure out your real fees and then attempt to credit you a balance that can only be used for another course.

13. Accounting systems are so opaque & poor that It is common place for people to give testimonies in church that they graduated without any debt magically appearing from somewhere just when you are on the crux of graduation.

14. One university lost their @TEDx license because they couldn’t bring themselves to follow Tedx’s terms and conditions. How hard could that have been really? Zero efforts were made to get it back since then.

15. One university deliberately defunded/ refused to fund and develop their e-learning platform(s) for fear that students would either stop coming over to the island and/or demand lower fees. This seemed to work until #Covid19 hit.

16. A student who got overall best student for his undergraduate and masters program respectively struggled to get a job placement or internship in the same university.

17. One student had left the dormitory since his first year but his school has been billing him for dorm fees for the last FOUR years.

18. One university does not even have a student portal. They just write how much a student is to pay on pieces of paper every semester.

19. Even though students have ID cards, international passports and resident permits, universities still bill students for “student letter” which expires within 30 days to prove they are students and without that letter, students cannot open bank accounts, register their phones and so. (Related: The curious case of the student letter.)

20. One student applied to have a semester frozen, was assured that it was indeed frozen only find out that it actually wasnt and the bills for that semester plus interest had piled up to be paid.