-

Managing financial aid forms proves to be the first test for incoming college student

Date published: 8/21/2008

IRECENTLY HAD a huge scare involving the funds for my education. Because of a notification earlier in the year, I had assumed that my first year of college was more than paid for, and that I would be receiving some money back. So I was shocked when I received an e-mail asking for my first payment of more than $3,000 for the first semester.

As it turns out, there were papers missing from my financial aid information that I had never been notified about, as well as some that I had informed the university I was exempt from, but had never been noted.

My initial reaction, of course, was to freak out and assume that I had no money at all to attend VCU this year. However, thanks to my parents' insistence that I get to the bottom of this thing, all was eventually solved.

The situation was, nonetheless, frightening. It takes only a few small mistakes or missed pieces to screw up something as important as financial aid. What bothered me in hindsight, however, was not any carelessness on my or the school's part--it was the fact that something that is designed to help the underprivileged is so confusing.

I was astonished at some of the demands in the Free Application for Federal Student Aid forms that I had to fill out back in February and the skipped ones I recently had to address. The forms asked for a summary of my parents' financial information during February--something that was difficult and tedious to obtain. I was also notified about the forms I was missing through e-mails over the course of several days, instead of all at once.

Because my father, whom I consider to be pretty smart, struggled to understand these forms and documents, I wondered how someone whose parents might really be uneducated and unaware of any of the realities of college or financial life would handle these documents. I was equally shocked to see the struggles my roommate had to go through to try to obtain financial aid, such as having to resend his tax information if he changed his filing status--something that takes time and costs money.

Date published: 8/21/2008