On May 1, only two weeks after federal taxes are filed, all Wesleyan financial aid papers were due. Many people struggle to get their taxes filed on time in the first place, and this makes the May 1 deadline particularly difficult to meet. On top of the tight time frame, students applying for aid must deal with all sorts of external factors. We have to track down and bother busy parent(s), send tax forms through the College Board (which takes up to two weeks to process forms), and deal with endless bureaucracy and confusing forms.
To those of you who, like us, did not get everything in on time—you’re busy; your parent(s) are busy, hard to contact, or unreliable; you’re not on campus; overnight mail is unaffordable—we thought you should know: Wesleyan’s penalty for late aid applications is FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS taken away from your need-based scholarship or grant and turned into $500 of additional student loans. We assume that Wesleyan decided to fine us through loans because they know it is unlikely that a financial aid student can pay a fee that makes up a large portion of her tuition.
When inquiring about the fee, we were told by the Office of Financial Aid that all schools have outrageous penalties and that we should be thankful to not be penalized more than once! Should we really just be thankful?
We called the Financial Aid Offices of several schools that are similar to Wesleyan. First of all, the schools with late fees or penalties all had deadlines after May 1. Columbia University, Bard, Williams, Antioch, Haverford and Skidmore had no fees whatsoever. A handful of schools had fines for applications that came in after June 1 which, ranged from $50 to $300.
Our experiences have left us both upset and angry, but like many other students on financial aid, the feeling that somebody else is paying for much of our education makes it difficult to complain and hard to feel entitled to $500 less debt. It’s not the extra debt that hurts the most, but rather that a financially wounding policy exists to discipline people who apply for financial aid in the first place precisely because they cannot afford a Wesleyan diploma anywhere near its retail price.
We feel strongly that the deadline of May 1 is an unrealistic one and that the $500 penalty in loans is excessive.
The university has so far “saved” $1,000 of its endowment by slapping us each with an even heavier burden of debt to leave here with. We think it’d be interesting to find out exactly how much Wesleyan is saving because of its classist policies. So if you, too, missed the deadline, let us know by sending an e-mail to tbarrett@wesleyan.edu or mfernandezbu@wesleyan.edu.
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