financial aid and rants and raves

To celebrate 11 years of blogging! Whomever states that blogging is your key to easy riches should be publicly flogged. We now return you to our blogging already in progress.

My so (not) money moment...

Podcasts are a great way to keep up on current events, learn new information, , and I love listening to them while I drive, exercise, or burn through folders at work. An audio library of stories, opinions, facts, and general conversation, you could spend all your waking hours listening and not even come close to barely scratching the surface. My favorites include Bill Simmons, Tim Ferriss, buying and building your own business, etc. One of my particular faves is Farnoosh Torabi's "So Money Podcast," because of the topics covered and the host's skill at presenting them in a cohesive and clear manner. One of her staples is to ask the guest what his or her money mantra is, i.e., what is your overarching philosophy of money. Since the guests are all successful, the answers are generally positive and empowering, though some shade their answers with admonishments or warnings. It took a while for me to answer the question for myself, and in keeping with my own experience and my dealings with older students, my was both negative and dis-empowering: do not believe that you have an unlimited amount of time and opportunity to change course or fix mistakes. Your relevancy in the world around you is finite, and life will eventually move on without you, no matter how competent or dynamic you feel yourself to be. This isn't merely a function of age (thought it's a huge factor), nor is it directly about money, but it applies so well to financial and professional situations it would still be my answer. I'll never be able to fix my retirement in the conventional sense, for one, and that mistake happened when I was 30.  It's also applicable now, as I see the changes in my office and know that I've been left behind. Can I adapt? In the short term, yes. The over staffing I described in the last post is an issue, one that will be corrected whether I work here or not. With that comes a change in the division of responsibilities, the uneven distribution of which is one of the reasons I'm feeling so irrelevant right now.

We all had our own roles to play in the office. I am excellent at public speaking, so I went to high schools, civic organizations, etc. Other counselors managed our book voucher program, etc. As rules changed, programs were introduced, and more people were hired, everyone got new responsibilities. The risible Academic Competitiveness Grant (ACG) was my headache, for example. All this reached another level when the college introduced People Soft in 2013, an HR database re-purposed for college administration. It's also unwieldy, mistake-riddled, and difficult to learn. It's worth the expense and trouble in the long-term, but the learning curve in the first 5 years is steep and miserable for the employees. Once those 5 years pass, your productivity skyrockets, which is where we are now. Specific counselors were in charge of working on specific tasks within People Soft, myself included, but others has much larger jobs while I did not. I had my own side job: veteran benefits. 


When I first started working here, I was put in charge of the VA benefits, which was a small portion of the job until around 2008, when the Post 9/11 GI Bill was created, putting the GI Bill program on a path to becoming its own office. Until that happened in 2014, I was overwhelmed with work. Effectively, I was working 1.75 jobs at the same time, and I nearly quit several times. Because I had those tasks to complete , other responsibilities, all created by People Soft, were given to other counselors. I still help with VA students occasionally, and I can still certify students if needed, but hopefully it remains outside of my purview. For the moment, it's simply too large for me to do both. However, we haven't changed who does what or who cleans up this problem or services that group. I can count on this getting fixed, giving me more work and more reason for staying employed, but as mentioned, it's stop-gap solution, ignoring the larger issue of automation and structural changes at the school. Strategies to overcome those issues will force me to go back down the rabbit hole I thought I'd escaped. More on that in the next post.

Without a dope(y) blog post to sift through.

(Ed. note: your humble blogger will be jumping from topic to topic like a rabbit on meth. He begs your indulgence.)

When I last posted, I spoke of a change in the way I saw the changes occurring here at the college, and alluded to the subsequent change in myself,  all stemming from a conversation with my director, and the fact that fellow Gen-X'er, Paul Ryan (R-WI), born in 1970, is now the Speaker of the House, made me realize that for the first time that not only could I be in charge, I should be in charge. By this I mean Director of Financial Aid or of VA Benefits, or anything that requires more authority that what I'm presently doing. Moreover, the structure of the school is changing, and there's opportunity in that shift. While it's a profound change in my own self-image, and very positive, it hasn't amounted to much, as the counter-revolution led by the teaching faculty has slowed the changes to some extent. More will be revealed, but I'm of the impression that the opportunities were oversold anyway, as is the custom here. Even if they are real, it's little more than a rear-guard action for me and my associates. You see, the page has finally turned, and the systems built over the past 5 years are finally doing what they were intended to do: automate the process as much as possible.

I've spoken on this topic before, but I've never seen Fall and Spring registration periods as quiet as the ones we've had this school year. We were supposed to be working late this week, but there's no need to spend the overtime budget when we simply don't have students to service. Being available outside of regular office hours is important, certainly, but it isn't worth spending extra money to keep us here. Thankfully, I have dibs on Ossining campus visits, so I lost one day, not two. Nevertheless, the gobs of overtime I've come to expect in 4 months out of the year simply won't be there. I even made slightly less in 2015 than I did in 2014, something that has happened once since 1999, and that was because of a huge retro check 5 years in the making. Still, all of this dances around a much larger issue to everyone who works in my office. Thanks to technology, financial aid is no longer a full-time job.

Truthfully, financial aid has never been a full-time job if your definition of full time is 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year. Even Mercy College, as horrible a place to work as it was, gave us 15 days vacation, the week between Christmas and New Year's off, and was closed on Fridays during the summer. Due to the limitations placed on aid and the culturally entrenched Sept. to May school year, all schools have significant down time. This could be July, August, and September for NYU, which packages its students in February and March, or my school, which is all but dead from late February through all of March and April. Other times are busy or slow depending on the college's withdrawal policies, whether it had dorms, which lends itself to students having emotional problems prior to Thanksgiving, etc. Other times of the year were occupied with cleaning up mistakes, students dropping classes, and helping transfer students. It could be busy, but nothing like the peak periods. With these ebbs and flows, we were free to take vacations, perform other services for the college like being a faculty Senator or serving on committees, go to training, what have you. I certainly participate in these activities, and the college benefits from my financial aid expertise, if only to keep other parts of the college in compliance. Still, these are ancillary facets of the position, elevating me from a mere advisor to a member of faculty, which is great, but secondary to working in the financial aid office.

The best way I can frame the situation is as follows. First, I can state we're overstaffed. With the total lack of students, how could I say otherwise? Actually, I could, but let's carry this thought experiment further. As people (and by that I mean counselors) retire, they won't be replaced. This will concentrate the work, keeping the rest of us busier. On the other hand, and far more worrisome, is that we aren't irrelevant, but I am.