BU financial aid office problems

yoyowashere
Sun, 26 May 2013 21:30:19 +0000

Hi. I am a rising sophomore in CAS. Anyway the main reason why I am making this post is mainly because I am mostly frustrated. If you are lucky, you may have been given a financial aid correspondent that actually cares about you and your situation. I was not. BU is very interesting - they make you believe that they are giving fair opportunities to the least fortunate students, but, in my honest opinion, they really don’t. And I’m not basing this thought off of what happened to me, I’m just going off stories with my classmates and friends. It’s weird. BU caters to families that are more affluent. Don’t get me wrong. I know I am receiving a top education here and I wouldn’t change my decision for the world. There are just things I have noticed after having to work with them for a year.

On to what happened to me…

I got a pretty hefty award when coming to BU and I received outside awards as well. To cut the story short, I practically had a full ride. So when it came time to receive my refund for fall semester, it was a really large refund, because I had extra money from outside awards. When it came time to receive my refund for spring semester, things got a little funky. I requested a little bit of refund, first and foremost to pay my housing deposit. I paid that. Then a few days after I was approved and given the refund, they called me back and told me they had made a mistake in giving me my refund. Which confused the mess out of me. How could they make a mistake in giving me MY money? They said I had gone over the cost of education budget and basically, due to federal regulations, they could not give me the rest of my refund. This also meant that, instead of receiving the rest of my refund, I now owed them that amount. Which still to this day confuses me. When I talked to them about it, they basically said that, because I had had a large refund the first semester so when my spring semester scholarship money came in, this placed me over the budget. So now I owe about $1500 to the financial aid office. It’s a small amount in comparison to how much BU costs and it’s an even smaller amount to deny someone a college education over, I think.

This mostly makes me really upset because I literally cannot go to my father to pay this bill like some other students may be able to. My family is poor and I only have work study and can’t afford to live and make payments on my student account at the same time (my father doesn’t send give me money so I relied on work study and my refund for living costs, going out, food, clothes, traveling home, etc).

I am living here in Boston for the summer, on campus. I’m doing a program that pays for my housing (since I can’t afford it) and am looking for a job on campus or off campus. I’m having A LOT of difficulty with this - especially since they refused to give me a summer work study award because of the balance on my account. Literally this balance on my account is making everything about coming from a poor family more difficult than it should have been. I can’t get summer work study; they also refuse to review my financial aid application, even if I have turned in FAFSA, CSS PROFILE, IDOC and whatever else by the deadline. Basically everything is halted until my balance is paid off, and mind you, it’s not a large balance. I’m pretty sure that if I could just get summer work study, I could go back to making payments on it. OR, of course, finding a summer job off campus, but job hunting is harder than it looks. I could have used the loans that I didn’t use during the school year (I only ended up having about $230 in loans at the end of the year), but again because I have a balance, they won’t let me touch those loans. Also you have to take six credits of summer courses that count towards you major. And there aren’t classes I could take, either because I can’t find six credits to count toward my major and because I have a conflicting schedule. Plus in order to use those loans, it could only be in summer session one.

I am LITERALLY backed into a wall here. I don’t know what to do, and I have until August 1st to pay off the entire balance. Besides, looking for a job, I don’t know what to do.

What I don’t understand is why the financial aid office would say I had X amount of refund, but ask for it back later. I don’t get that. Once this spring semester, I talked to my financial aid correspondent, and she insinuated that I splurged the refund, which is very untrue. I used it on the regular things a student would use it on, especially if they don’t have support from their parent(s). I really hated that she insinuated that - I felt horrible about the situation already. And I also feel like, with them being a FINANCIAL AID office, they would have advised against something like this. I think the fact that my parents are inaccessible, being so far way and all, is something the office is using to their advantage. I’m sure they would be a lot more fair and kind about the situation if I had a parent around. But then again, it is BU, and people warned me about the financial aid office before I came here.

I just have one question for you: Do you think I should really be held responsible for the balance that is on my account? Because I really don’t think I should be penalized so harshly for this. I worked very hard to get to BU. There are many reasons why I left home and I really don’t want to have to go back in August. I have so many things here in Boston: friends, school, so many things and places left to explore. I met my best friend at BU - I don’t want to leave her so soon. It may sound like I am whining, but I am just really up in the air on what to do here and would genuinely like some feedback, please.