If you’re going to college in Florida, you’ve probably encountered the struggle of the dreaded Summer Class Requirement: 9 credit hours of beach-time sucking classes. While summer classes can be a helpful tool in trying to get ahead, many students have no need for them. Therefore, forcing them on students is only a carefully planned money-making tactic, as the requirement is unavoidable and often expensive.

The first major problem with the summer class requirement is the fact that it is extremely expensive for students. Using scholarship money to pay for these summer classes is unreasonably difficult. You have to fill out an application in order to access your scholarship money and you need to be taking a certain number of credit hours over the summer to be allowed to apply your own scholarship money towards these classes. Once you finally have permission to use your scholarship money to pay for your summer classes, it is taken out of the scholarship money that will be applied to your next semester of classes. Essentially, you can either pay for classes during the summer or during the fall.

This leaves students in an awkward position, wherein they must decide if they want to pay out of pocket, or if they want to take out student loans to pay for these summer classes. Either way, this summer class requirement does them unnecessary monetary damage.

However, the unnecessary spending on these summer classes doesn’t stop there. Unless you’re lucky enough to take an online class over the summer, students are forced to pay for several additional months of housing, whether it be on campus or off campus. So not only is the university getting money from you for summer classes and textbooks for those classes through this requirement, it is also getting money for housing you over the summer, money that they wouldn’t get if they weren’t forcing you to stay at school over the summer and take classes.

Additionally, escaping from these required summer classes is near impossible. Students who do not need to take summer classes to graduate on time, or who cannot afford to pay out of pocket for summer classes, should be able to opt out of taking summer classes. Unfortunately, as the University of Central Florida’s Frequently Asked Questions page states, they will only “waive the application of this regulation in cases of unusual hardship to the individual.” Their Summer Waiver page then states that you can only file for this requirement to be waived if “you have no more available summer terms before graduation.” In doing this, they ensure that not only is it hard for you to get the Summer Class Requirement waived in the first place, by the time you find out if you’re approved or not, you may be stuck graduating late to fulfill the requirement.

With all of the ridiculous hoops that you have to jump through, as well as all of the benefits to the universities, it’s clear that the Sumer Class Requirement only exists to make money off of students. It’s not about the learning experience or getting ahead, it’s about requiring students to give universities even more money than they already are for their Spring and Fall term classes.