As most everyone knows, Disney College Program students get free access into the Disney parks. Until recently at Walt Disney World they also received three passes that allowed them to get up to three guests in six times a year.
Starting in the Spring 2016 semester, College Program students will only receive their own self entrance pass when they arrive.
Now, you're wondering, can College Program students get any guests in for free at all anymore? or has that perk been removed completely?
No. The good news is that it has not been removed completely.
Instead of getting the three cards that are reusable to allow up to three people in for a total of six days a year, College Program students now get single day passes based on how many hours they have worked. I've been told that these new passes are printable passes that you exchange at the ticket booths.
The system works as follows:
At 150 hours, students receive three single day passes to all one person in per pass for one day.
At 300 hours, they receive three more of these single day passes.
The final time they receive passes is at 600 hours. They get three more passes for a total of nine passes.
Many students are upset about this as it doesn't allow you to let in your family for as often as it did before. In the previous system you could potentially let in 18 people. But you could also end up letting in only six people and still use up all the passes you have, as they disappeared based on the number of days used, not how many people used them.
With these new passes, you can either let one person in for nine days, or let nine different people in or any variation that you'd like to use up the nine passes. The other big difference about these passes is when you earn them. Typically, with the old system, you got your passes about two weeks after you went through Traditions.
I asked students of the college program how they felt about this new system. I got a few different response.
One student simply proclaimed "this sucks" without giving much other opinion.
Christina Feeler says "I don't mind it. I only ever gave my passes to people close to me". She admits that it might be harder for people doing just spring or fall to get the full 9 passes they can earn, but at least they don't lose two passes when they only let one person in as they did in the last system.
Jeffrey Filko says that it is "amazingly superior" to what he received as a College Program student. He had gotten no guest passes, and only a few complimentary tickets as a College Program student in 1996 and 1997.
Meg Devereux is bummed about it because she is doing the Summer Alumni program and doesn't think she'll earn enough hours to really get the passes. However, since she was a Seasonal cast member she likes that it evens the field because if people didn't work their full required hours for the year, they could still use the same amount of passes she did until Disney removed them from the system with the previous pass system.