When Lauren Polak went into the Registrar’s Office to request transcripts, she was surprised to hear it would cost her $105 for seven transcripts.
“I had just been in there a few weeks before, and it was only $4 in office to pick them up,” she said. “And then she’s telling me it’s going to be $15 if you want them in your hand, and I was thinking, ‘Oh my goodness that’s a lot of money for seven transcripts.’”
Polak, an alumna who graduated in 2007, was recently laid off from her teaching job and needed transcripts to apply for jobs.
Registrar Kathie Beaty said the price of requesting a transcript to be mailed somewhere went from $4 to $7. If students want to immediately get their transcripts from the office, it will cost them $15 per transcript, a $9 increase.
The prices were raised about two weeks ago.
“A lot of people want to come in and walk out with their transcripts,” Beaty said. “It means that people have to stop what they’re doing and handle that transcript.”
However, Polak said because she lives in Peoria Heights, it’s easy for her to go to the Registrar’s Office and pick up her transcripts.
“It’s more convenient to go there and send them off than for them to send them to me and have to wait to send them off,” she said.
Beaty said the new prices are comparable to those of other universities, which usually charge $10 or $15.
“We realized that by raising our cost of transcript it was not going to be out of the norm,” Beaty said.
Beaty said the Registrar’s Office has been doing research about transcript prices for about three or four years.
“The price of the transcript has been the same since the early ’90s,” she said. “It’s been between 15 and 20 years, and everything is more expensive now.”
Beaty said the cost of postage has gone up, and it is expensive to purchase security paper.
Security paper “has things embedded in it that make it very difficult for people to fraudulently create transcripts of their own or make copies of it,” she said.
Beaty said she isn’t sure exactly where the money from the transcripts go.
“Eventually it does trickle down to us,” she said. “It probably goes for operating and eventually, yes, it would have an effect on my office.”
