system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Most Effective Way to Handle Administrative Garbage Fire?

I work as an academic advisor at a college that does a lot of hand-holding with its students, and recently administration has asked something of us that I think just *screams* "DISASTER".

Sometimes students will plan out the classes they need to graduate, and we have those on file. Well, administration is asking all academic advisors to register **ALL** these students for their planned classes *by any means necessary*. Hence, **they've asked us to register students for classes without their consent**, **bill them**, and send out statements and try contacting them in every way possible to let them know they've been registered for all their classes for the upcoming semester; phone, e-mail, etc.

I can understand that administration is trying to make the students' lives much easier by not having them come and register where we can do it for them, but "by any means necessary" means asking the advisors to squeeze in registering a mountain of students on top of the ones we have to handle in-person and online. The whole process is manual; we must go in for each student, fill out paperwork by hand to register the student, *actually check to make sure the student can even take the classes they wrote*, register, and send them their class schedule and bill via mail or e-mail. If the student says they don't want to take classes, then it's also our responsibility to unregister the student and fill out all the separate paperwork to remove them from the class. And we do this painfully slowly... one... by... one. For hundreds of students.

What kind of steps can I as the advisor take to make this process as painless as possible for myself? Indeed, as I've mentioned, I'm getting quite a few students contacting me back saying they want me to delete their registration as they're not coming back in the fall. We are the kind of college that says "Yes, you can" to all students, but that in turn makes the job significantly more demanding in that we have lots of people just come in off the street saying they want to take classes but not necessarily for what, and this contributes to a heavy amount of walk-in traffic that we're expected to handle, where we're seeing students left and right all day, getting them registered for classes; now we have to handle even more responsibility on top of our busy schedules.

We don't have any system to automate the process for us such as registering and sending the e-mails. All of that has to be done by-hand. If anyone has had to do something like this before, are there any free tools we might be able to use that would make this significantly less arduous to accomplish?
gpt
I worked in a place that did something similar. It was awful and unethical and tons of people ended up with delinquent bills they had no idea existed.

Contact your state higher ed governing board and send a complaint to your regional accrediting body. 

I would not register students without their permission.