Student service for all

Our most vulnerable college population is often the international students. Besides language barriers and making true friends, schools sometimes treat them as ‘cash cows’ to be milked until dry.

 “A Foreign Student's Very Expensive Cab Ride”

“A Chinese student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign fell victim to a scam upon arriving at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, the News-Gazette reported. The student, who apparently had limited English ability, was trying to figure out how to catch a bus to Champaign at around 6 p.m. when a man approached, said the bus wouldn’t be there until midnight, and offered to drive him to his destination for $1,000. The student agreed; upon arrival, the man wrote down the cost of the trip as being $4,800. The student did not have that much money on hand but gave him what he had – believed to be $4,240”.

“The website for UIUC's International Student and Scholar Services office does include information on transportation to campus”.

Read here: http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/09/03/foreign-students-very-expensive-cab-ride

While the school’s website might indeed have this info, it is amazing how many domestic students do not know about all the services available to them, so how do we expect someone with potentially limited language ability to know?

Let us make sure we are extending the appropriate student services for all our students.

Dr Flavius A B Akerele III

The ETeam