<p>OP, you are acting as if your D is entitled to money from BU. Why should she be? Just because others received certain money does not mean your D definitely should have received some. When my D was applying to boarding school, her top school said they did not receive a form that her guidance counselor had definitely sent. She was accepted, but was not awarded any aid. Thus, she did not get to attend the boarding school. Sure, we were mad, but never even thought of bringing a law suit into the situation! That’s what is wrong with society today; everyone is so quick to blame others. Workers are human, colleges are getting thousands of documents, and sending things electronically is NEVER a good idea for something so important. Sure, a “read receipt” was probably received, but that doesn’t mean the worker even ever saw the attachment, or that is opened correctly. Email, etc, should never be used for something so important! Your D will have to choose another school; one she will probably love. Take this occurrance as fate. Maybe she is not meant to be at the school friends are at, if she does so much better than them academically. Learn from this experience so it doesn’t happen again, and move on.</p>
<p>BU gave her permission to email her form. They provided confirmation of receipt of the form. The young lady did follow-up less than three weeks from the email and was told that because they could not seem to find her form she would not receive any money.</p>
<p>The young lady is a new citizen to this country; she did everything on her end with respect to grades and studies. She completed all applications, including submittal of this form within required time limits. </p>
<p>Its clear the form was lost due to incompetence on BU’s part, and its going to cost her significantly more to attend her college of choice, if she can afford it at all.</p>
<p>All I can say is that if I were on a jury, I would say its clear that a mistake was made and that BU needs to cough up some cash here, and not try to hide behind some vague policy of we don’t have to justify anything to anyone.</p>
<p>I think that someone at BU noticed that her paperwork was not complete. They had reason to question her citizenship and requested the information, probably because international students may be treated differently and she needed verification of sorts to be treated as a US citizen/permanent resident. That the item was sent immediately but not applied to her file was the problem. So by the time , they came back to her file, the money was already depleted. </p>
<p>This happens a lot. We just aren’t aware of it most of the time. A rec missing, transcript misplaced. Count the number of admissions/fin aid people, the number of apps and the time period they have to be processed. Not a lot of time pre app.</p>
<p>Just curious, how could money be depleted? They have not even gotten all the replies back from all the accepted students. Probably have not done any of the returning students financial aid nor should they have gone through all the appeals yet. Everything seems to be fungible at that point, one case seems like a little blip especially for a pretty big school like BU. So if they want her and think she deserves the aid or if they feel they are the one who made the mistake then they should be able to work things out. I don’t know. My take is OP is not totally serious about suing, it seems like it is just mostly frustration.</p>
<p>Why on earth have you decided that an appeal won’t be of any use?</p>
<p>Appeals of financial aid packages are the correct course of action when one is not happy with their financial aid award. Your case will be evaluated by a committee and what you have told us you have a strong case.</p>
<p>This appeals process exists for just this kind of situation and it will cost you nothing, whereas a lawsuit will cost you plenty.</p>
<p>Again I ask…was this an ED acceptance? BU website says that the RD decisions were mailed out beginning MID MARCH. This student knew she had issues with her financial aid in FEBRUARY. If this was an ED acceptance, the priority deadline for financial aid applications was much earlier than for RD applicants.</p>
<p>There were NO LAWS broken here…none. ON what basis would a jury award this student aid considering that the school doesn’t guarantee to give ANYONE aid.</p>
<p>I suppose a jury could mandate that BU review the kid’s financial aid file…but BU could do so, and still not award a nickel in aid.</p>
<p>And to the OP…re: the other student…you don’t know whether this other student received one of BU’s more competitive merit awards…if that is the case, it is determined on a case by case basis.</p>
<p>I agree that OP doesn’t have a good reason for a lawsuit.</p>
<p>But it’s completely irrelevant whether any laws were broken. This is civil law, not criminal law!</p>
<p>When I was feeling dejected by what Boston University did to my daughter, I am very much heartened to see so many here taking the time to understand my grievance and express their thoughts about it. Thank You to all.</p>
<p>The thought of suing them came to me not to take any of their money. I don’t want somebody else’s money. It is my sense of justice and my sense of helplessness as a parent seeing his daughter’s hope shattered for something she was least responsible for, that made me think about it. We had submitted all the forms in time (right before the Feb 15 deadline). There was nothing wrong in them. As someone here noted, citizenship verification seems to be done on some random mechanism or when something in a record, which is not of your doing, has some kind of mismatch. My daughter is a citizen of the US, though she wasn’t born here. </p>
<p>I am at a loss to understand many things as to how the college finance offices work. But is it too much to expect that an obvious blunder, even after I showed them the proof, should be acknowledged and if possible, be rectified? This should not be an isolated incident – they should be facing quite a few like this every year! And they should have a provision for it if they are an institute of honorable repute. I would have cared less about the grants if they had told me that they were not in a position to give my daughter any money. But after they told me that it was because of a delay in a document she lost her chances to get any grant, I got frustrated. For, that issue was obviously created by the financial office and not because we failed to do something right! They ask for something, you submit the document, you receive an acknowledgment for it, and two weeks later (after you became anxious since everyone else was getting their grants and you didn’t and hence called and asked what was going on) they say they don’t have that document, ask you to send it again, and then they say that since you didn’t submit it on time they weren’t able to offer any grant – all this doesn’t make any sense to me. One could even suspect something ulterior about it. Why spend so much money on application, college visit and more than that your time on essays, applications, CSS profiles and FAFSAs when they can in one sweep reject everything by giving a reason as that? Why would a middle class parent like me even think of applying to BU if they would clearly tell you that you should only be lucky and not anything else to get their grant? </p>
<p>BU was my daughter’s first choice (even above MIT) since the subjects that they offered had a perfect balance of what she was expecting to do. Yes, with her good academic score, she got admission in two IVY league Schools (she has lesser interest in them for the choice of her academic interests), but she had so much made up her mind about BU. And to add fuel to the fire, she later got a mail from the College offering her a 10K merit research fellowship if she would do some research there. This is exactly the kind of thing a student who is really interested in pursuing education would dream of. But what is the use of it now? It is a great loss for her because I cannot cough up the 59K fee! They admit that she is a good student having very good merit and also said that she very narrowly missed the Presidential scholarship of 20K/year. But how would a middle-class parent pay $59K to send her to this college? Believe me, BU has given grants much more than any other school for many of her friends. Imagine the psychological damage she must have gone through when she found that a few of her friends who didn’t deserve it as much as her both in merit and financial background got a cake-walk while all her credentials were utterly useless for her! </p>
<p>Well, I understand that is how Life is. She has decided to move on, but it is difficult for me as a parent who has seen his kid silently take a blow as that. No, it is not for any revenge, or for money, but for a sense of elemental justice, the thought that I should sue them came to me. Thank You all, again.</p>
<p>OP, did you file an appeal? Do not be discouraged by the low grade gatekeepers at the FA office. Stay calm, write a letter and along with the email correspondence you had with them email the appeal. It usually takes 2-4 days to rule on it. I would also CC the letter to the Dean of Admissions, the regional coordinator, and may be the chairman-contact person of the specific dpt she is interested to join. </p>
<p>When I lived in the commonwealth of hackarama I learned that’s how you have to work the system there. I even used to get notifications for programs or scholarships that the postage stamp on the envelope made it clear they got mailed after the deadline to apply. (One wonders why.) You bet my kid got accepted magically in the program, when I send the envelope, or cc supervisors.</p>
<p>Uriah, let those in charge know exactly what happened. Whether that means your daughter would get another review and and get some aid, or not, it does allow the university know what happened and have a chance to rectify it. </p>
<p>Whether she would have gotten a nice aid package if all of her paperwork were in order is unknown. I read and hear all of the time about how “lesser applicants” got this or that, and maybe it is true, but sometimes there is more to the “lesser applicants” than meets the eye. Suffice to say, in your case, that your daughter did not get the consideration she deserved to get due to BU’s carelessness in paperwork. </p>
<p>Hopefully, someone at BU will do the right thing about this. What happened is not unusual, but you have a paper trail and evidence, to show that she was not given full consideration or any consideration for aid due to a missing item that was submitted on a timely basis and that it was a mistake the university made.</p>
<p>Since you don’t know how the financial aid process works you need to listen to them when they tell you what to do. They told you to appeal. We can’t do anything for you, they can. Plead your case to them.</p>
<p>I got annoyed by one persons post where they said if they were on the jury that they would favor the plaintiff in a case of UriahHeep v. BU, in terms of BU’s supposed negligence in the financial aid department.</p>
<p>Quick law review, the plaintiff (UriahHeep) has to prove four things in court.</p>
<p>1) Duty - Is there a duty of care owed by the defendant?
– Right off the bat, no. They don’t agree to meet-need. Even then, they don’t agree to meet-need for those who don’t adhere to deadlines. Without even getting into the other ones, this case is thrown out.</p>
<p>2) Breach of Duty & 3) Causation & 4) Actual Damage
– All three don’t apply because there was no duty. Though even if there was a duty, the other three parts can easily be argued against the plaintiff.</p>
<p>So, to the original poster. You can sue, and you will lose.
To the jury in this case, learn basic tort law. Frivolous lawsuits are awful.</p>
<p>Thankfully your D has 2 ivy acceptances ! Wow! So many would kill to have even ONE. </p>
<p>I think your D should revist the ivies and pick one. </p>
<p>Just curious, how could money be depleted? They have not even gotten all the replies back from all the accepted students.</p>
<p>Schools “over award” because they know about how many will accept. Their models tell them how much they can over-award and then end up with their targeted budget.</p>
<p>M2K is correct; BU knows coming out of the box how much they are going to give in FA, and how much they have to offer in order to net the amount they set in their budget.They also know that the majority of the people given an offer is not going take them up on it so in reality there is no “extra” monies.</p>
<p>BU themselves state:
</p>
<p>They use this an an example:
</p>
<p>I understand that they model these things but it is still a model with margin of error. There are wiggle room no matter how you do it. I bet they even model how much they will have to award the appeals. Maybe someone said it correctly, it is just the gatekeeper quick response, do the appeal and make your cases and make sure most upper level people are aware of the case. Don’t give up yet, I think OP still have a chance. Good luck.</p>
<p>Just curious…if this student got accepted to the two Ivies, did she receive sufficient need based aid to attend? Or was she hoping for enough merit aid from BU so that it would cover some of that family contribution? </p>
<p>Perhaps there was also a lack of need that was noted by BU…especially if the two Ivies didn’t come up with sufficient aid for her to attend.</p>
<p>What are the aid packages from the ivies?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>To me it seems like BU did evaluate her package. She missed the requirements for a Presidential scholarship (she did not get the Trustee full tuition scholarship). They gave Op’s D a 10k fellowship. It seems like OP was looking for merit and need based aid to defray the cost. </p>
<p>If Op’s D had been given the 20k scholarship, would Op have been in a position to make BU work?</p>
<p>BU states that </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Since BU does not meet need, maybe they were not just not into wooing student to attend.</p>
<p>Does anyone know if BU stacks multiple merit along with need based aid?</p>
<p>It seems that OP was hoping for the 20K merit and that would be sufficient to make it work by stretching the family’s finance. Thus the ivies are unworkable as they do not offer merit based.</p>
<p>Another issue, not for the OP, is that many parents do not pay attention for schools that state they will offer full aid if the parents income is under 65k and only require 10% if it is under 150k. But the next statement on that policy is that if the family has large assets, then regardless of income, you will have to contribute in a higher % for the tuition. Also many parents, as we have seen on CC repeatedly do not understand what income range means middle class.</p>
<p>Just to answer a few questions asked: She got around 30K grants from the IVY leagues. We would have to pay 30K there but 59K at BU.</p>