As a rising senior, I’m working on completing what I hope will be the final challenge of my time here at Wesleyan: not my thesis, but the complicated, frustrating system that Wesleyan uses for financial aid. The Wesleyan Financial Aid Survey is easy enough, but getting both my parents’ and my signed tax returns and W-2s mailed to Iowa before the due date required is a feat to orchestrate, given that you have to sign the returns by hand (even if you filed online, as I do) and my parents live in Michigan. The FAFSA (as featured in this NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/education/22fafsa.html ) is “so intimidating—with more than 100 questions—that critics say it scares off the very families most in need, preventing some teenagers from going to college.”
Of course, these teenagers will not have to deal with the real horror: the College Board CSS PROFILE application, a fiendish device of financial torture that the Financial Aid department here requires. First, the PROFILE costs $16. A pittance, you might say, but to have to pay for your financial aid application? Not to mention that incoming freshmen have to pay that for every college they apply to that uses the PROFILE…I recall paying over $100 just to be considered for financial aid a few years back. And frankly, after paying for my SATs, I hardly feel like the College Board needs any more money from college-bound students.
Beyond that, the PROFILE goes far more in depth than the FAFSA, asking questions that are difficult to answer even with my financial history of the last two years sitting in front of me. Besides questions asking me for imaginary numbers (“Enter the total amount you expect to earn in wages, salaries, tips, etc. during the summer of 2009” “Enter the total amount you expect to earn in wages, salaries, tips, etc. during the 2009-2010 school year” “Enter the amount your parents think they will be able to pay for your 2009-2010 college expenses” or the most ridiculous “Enter the amount of medical and dental expenses your parent(s) expect to pay in 2009 that will not be covered by insurance”) or questions asking for information most people don’t even know (“What is the current market value of your parents’ home?”) there are other questions that become more complicated due to other financial circumstances
For example, the seemingly simple “Enter your earnings from Federal Work-Study or other need-based work programs” becomes more complicated in my situation: I dropped my work-study in September for an extra $2,000 in loans. So my work-study is all the money I made from Wesleyan from January to September 2008, but not any of the money after that; this requires going back through my pay stubs and adding up all the money I made in those months. And of course, let’s not forget that although all the money I make at my two on-campus jobs goes straight to my tuition, because I made more than $8,000 last year, my financial aid this year can only decrease (because since I made more money, I can pay the school more money, right?). That’s just one example; the point is that Wesleyan desperately needs a new financial aid system, one that can adequately account for students’ actual circumstances and doesn’t just rely on a formula, and one that doesn’t require students to spend every spring freaking out about whether or not they’re correctly guessing how much money they might be making next year.
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