Financial Crisis
Many East Carolina University students are struggling to receive their financial aid for the 2007 school year.
The financial aid department has had a line of students needing to receive their financial aid nearly two months after school has begun.
This is a major issue concerning a vast number of individuals. Students and their families have to come up with the full amount of their tuition bill with no help from financial aid.
This might not seem like a big deal to some people, but to others it is a huge deal. Out-of-state students tuition bill is around seven thousand dollars. Although this is a stressful situation now, parents and students will be reimbursed when their money is available.
I myself am an out-of-state student that had to come up with nearly seven thousand dollars because my financial aid was not approved by the time my tuition bill was due, even though I sent in all the required paperwork over a month before school started.
Luckily, I am fortunate enough that I was able to come up with the money needed to stay enrolled in school, but what about the students that didn’t have the money available to them?
“It took about a month for me to actually get my student loans.” Julie Lewis. Lewis is a senior at East Carolina University. “This is the first year that I had any trouble getting my loan money.”
This is my second year here at ECU and the previous year none of these problems occurred. And from what I have heard talking to dozens of other students about the issue this is the first year that there really have been any major problems.
“They gave my money to someone else.” Kyle Allen said. Kyle Allen, 21, is a junior and an in-state student that was forced to come up with his tuition bill.
“It’s crazy. I don’t see how you give somebody’s money to another student.” He said. It took a few weeks to figure out exactly what happened with Allen’s financial aid money, but they got it taken care of.
Nobody at the financial aid department could tell me anything specific about why there are so many problems this year.
All that the counselors could say was that some of the loan agencies were taking a lot longer to approve student loans than they have in years past, and that the financial aid department was doing the best they could to get students their money.
It seems that the Stafford loan has been causing most of the problems. That loan is provided by an outside agency, but you have to apply for the loan through financial aid.
Problems that have occurred with the Stafford loan involve students turning in their paperwork after the deadline, and the problem that was most prevalent was that many students did not put the ECU school code on some of their forms.
Next year, when you are filling out your financial aid and loan applications make sure they are done right and are turned in on time to avoid the problems that have haunted many students this year.
Filed under: Hard News