financial aid and rants and raves

'Round and 'round, 'round and 'round.

Blogging is a funny hobby, and by funny I mean strange. I could have a million ideas roaming around my mind, but unless I can come up with a good intro, I simply can't seem to write. Five months ago I had a killer tag line, but it was a time sensitive reference, so the hook isn't there anymore. I'm sure I'll use it in the future, but now it's time for an update 6 months in the making.

First, Excelsior was not the nightmare I expected it to be; it was actually a little worse. I knew it would be an unwieldy mess, but I was unprepared for the the day to day, nut and bolts of managing the program. It took the least appealing aspects of three different aid types: the Academic Competitiveness Grant (ACG), now mercifully defunct, the GI Bill, and the Tuition Assistance Program (TAP), New York's homegrown financial aid. ACG, another form of aid I was summarily assigned to manage, was a (very) little extra money for students in the first two years who were taking certain majors and classes. It has many different and arcane regulations, and not meeting any one criteria would prevent you from getting the money. It was a fixed $375 per semester, so it never made much difference, but the level of manual processing needed to research, package, and verify students made it feel like I was handing out full rides to Yale. The program died an ignominious death, and was not mourned. Excelsior has similarly involved requirements, only I have to keep checking from July to the end of September, and again throughout November, December, and January. Then I get to talk to students who lost their money, either for the new term, or for the term that just ended, meaning they owe the school money with few options for getting it in other (loans) ways, or never qualified in the first place.

This is an excellent segue to the next aid program on the list: the GI Bill, which I also managed as a solo endeavor until 2013, when I damn near quit due to the unmanageable workload. My threats were not idle in this case, and as prior blog posts detailed, I had any number of alternatives up my sleeve at the time. The college knew all this, and a new VA manager was hired. Anyway, the requirement to continuously re-examine the progress of students is not a facet of ACG, but of the GI Bill. Furthermore, neither TAP nor ACG requires me to take money away in most cases unless a student never attends a class, making him or her part time - I can't pay for classes you don't actually bother to show up for. Technically, I'm not taking away money, but I'm telling HESC not to pay it after the fact. This can occur many months later, since there are multiple targets a student must meet. I could have to take away money from a fall term 2017 in August of 2018, and that's not hyperbole. The same applies to the GI Bill, since an incomplete could turn into an "F" grade and I may then have to report attendance, or the lack thereof,  and the student may have to pay back thousands (yes, $1,000's) of dollars. The stakes aren't quite as high, thankfully, but the sums aren't necessarily trivial, either.

So what happens if or when (when, the word is when...) a student's grades go sideways, or worse yet, when they do really well, but still don't earn enough credits to keep their money? Well, I tell HESC they don't qualify and we chase them for the money, or if it's really retroactive (say Fall's payment is suddenly due when I tell HESC 11 months later that the student shit the academic bed...? Yes, it can will happen) then New York will bill the student. But you (okay, the student, or the student's parents, or both) protest: there's a really good reason! It's even possible they're telling the truth. What to do? Well, the student, and only the student, can appeal the situation to HESC. This is sort of telling an astronaut to fly into a black hole with the hope of exiting a white hole on the other side, but for now it's the only option. I always tell students the HESC wants to deal only with the student; the agency doesn't really want to speak with financial aid offices, and this is true. However, the students don't understand the system the way that I do, and are at a severe disadvantage. It sucks, but since this is HESC's default setting, I don't expect it to change any time soon.

More than anything, Excelsior did something to our office I didn't think was possible: it reversed the automation we've been trying so hard to integrate. I estimate it set us back anywhere from 3-5 years, as mentioned in a prior post, but I underestimated the level of student contact and paperwork the program would engender for the office as a whole, as so many people applied for financial aid who would never have done so in the past, and all of them had to examined, either by me for Excelsior, or another counselor based on the alphabet, or both. Naturally, the bulk of this work came as the same week the first payment was due.

So another boondoggle has been created, and the process went so horribly right. I'm busier than I've been in years, and the college is very happy with how I've handled the situation. I'm attending training, representing the college to civic organizations, and racking up plenty of overtime along the way.  That's good news, since our office, in the intervening 2 months since I started this post, found out that our director is retiring, and we're all shocked and a little afraid. The college is a weird, and occasionally difficult place to work, and being in charge is even tougher. She's handled the situation beautifully, and she will be desperately missed. She saw the changes that I've been seeing, and since she's in a position to go, she's going. We have 6 months to figure out what's next, both as an office and as individuals. This is usually the place where I spout off about what scheme I'm cooking up as a segue to my next post, but I simply don't have the energy. There are bigger issues to examine, so it's time to put on my thinking cap and meditate on my next topic.