Financial Aid stole Pell Grant?

suzuki
Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:10:13 +0000

My wife and I are both students receiving the Pell Grant, but we go to different local colleges. My wife had some issues with her school’s financial aid office, and it looks suspicious to me, but I don’t know who to contact (can’t find the Dean’s email address and the financial aid office refuses to cooperate), and I’m reluctant to accuse anyone of stealing just yet.

My wife filed her FAFSA at the end of July, and I filed mine around mid-late August. On her FAFSA, the site wouldn’t accept both members of the household as being students and generated an error, so she marked down “1” and contacted the financial aid office to correct it. They corrected it, however they erroneously marked me as a “dislocated worker” and they missed an error in her tax info. So she went back in and corrected this, which ended up changing her EFC number. This apparently delayed her Pell Grant until September, when she received $1300. Her tuition being $1820, she got a school job that paid a “gap scholarship” of $520

This is where things get suspicious. In October, she received a notice saying that her award was reduced to $1025. She took this notice to her school job so they could adjust her gap scholarship to make up the difference ($795). Then in December, near the end of the semester, she received another notice, this time saying that her award was raised to $2600, and that she would not receive the Pell Grant for Spring 2012. When she took this letter to her school job, the secretary used the end of the semester as an excuse for laziness and refused to take it, telling my wife to turn it in next semester. So she does. And then gets fired from her school job for turning in the letter late, and the manager accuses her of trying to steal money saying that “you shouldn’t have gotten the job if you already have a Pell Grant”. My wife shows her manager the evidence, and her manager claims she will investigate it, but then runs off to some vacation abroad; and the lazy secretary now just tells my wife “there’s nothing we can do to help you”.

Upon confronting the financial aid office, they claimed that her Pell Grant was denied for Spring 2012 because she is “too close to graduation”.

This is absolutely ridiculous. My wife’s tax information is the exact same as mine, our graduation dates are only one term away from each other (hers is Summer, mine Fall), and I have received my full Pell Grant for both Fall '11 and Spring '12 semesters. This “too close to graduation” excuse for pulling her Spring '12 award, from what I can tell, is a steaming pile of crap. I cannot find any evidence that a student’s proximity to graduation effects the Pell Grant.