Issue date: 12/5/07 Section: Opinion

Scott Allen

I know every Sacramento State student could not contain his or her excitement when the school issued the new OneCards in November.

I dashed off to the old bookstore to get my new card, knocking people over and screaming with excitement.

I was surprised, however, to see a bunch of Wells Fargo suits with clipboards and cheesy smiles signing people up for checking accounts. I was shocked, dismayed and saddened.

How could our school do it?

How could they have…yes they did it, they outsourced another school-administered entity/program to a private company. As soon as I got my new card, which has a beauty of a picture of Sac State on it, I stuffed it in my wallet and rushed out before anyone could see my tears.

I'm sure I am the only one bored enough to rant about a stupid piece of plastic, but there is a bigger issue to be addressed. Our new bookstore is run by a private, for-profit company, University Enterprises Inc., which has turned into President Gonzalez's personal slush fund (maybe he can hire Emeril to cook for his "guests") and the California State University Board of Trustees have entrusted Gonzalez to run Sac State Inc. like a Fortune 500 company.

Okay, so back to the OneCard. Now, if a Sac State student has a Wells Fargo account, he or she can link it to the OneCard and withdraw money free of charge at any Wells Fargo ATM and make purchases using a pin number.

Great, so there is no benefit to students unless they want a Wells Fargo checking account. Well, I have experience with Wells Fargo. As a former account holder, I can tell you that all those Washington Mutual ads saying, "Tired of your current bank charging a fee for everything?" are so true.

Wells Fargo did have a fee for everything, even a $2 fee for calling its customer service. The most nefarious fee it has is overdraft fees. I know most banks have overdraft fees, but it was the way Wells Fargo implemented it that was maddening. It was during a time in my life when my account was especially empty and perpetually so. They would wait until my balance was below $5 to charge me the monthly service fee of $5 resulting in an automatic overdraft fee of something close to $30, if I remember correctly. I finally gave up on them after paying them to take my money, switched banks and made sure I had more than $5 in my new account.

Unless you simply have to have a fee-laden Wells Fargo account, the only winner in this transaction is Wells Fargo, and no doubt, it signed plenty of students up for new accounts. No one knows what will be the next school function to be outsourced, but this won't be the last time. Don't sign up for a Wells Fargo account and don't buy in to the corporate model the school is adopting and the trustees are sanctioning.

It is just a piece of plastic with a picture on it and most Sac State students could care less about it. However, these incremental steps toward privatization of school functions should raise all sorts of flags, because students don't have a say in what entities are administering the programs that directly affect them. Furthermore, private companies have only one goal: to make a profit. One can choose not to sign up for a Wells Fargo account, but the fact that we have yet another private company invading our public institution means that students are no longer the top priority…indeed we haven't been for some time.

Scott Allen can be reached at sallen@statehornet.com

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