At the Financial Aid Forum on Sunday, student attendees who applied Early Decision (ED) to Wesleyan protested that they had received a smaller final financial aid package than what was originally estimated in their acceptance letters in December. The complaint surprised members of the Financial Aid Committee of the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA), which hosted the forum, and has sparked discussion about how to prevent confusion in the future.
“As a student, I was sort of upset and a little bit disappointed,” said WSA Vice President Ben Firke ’12. “Obviously whenever there’s a discrepancy between what people think they’re going to get and what they actually get—even though it is understood that is an estimate and not a promise—one hopes that the discrepancy wouldn’t be as large as some people reported it was.”
Small discrepancies between the estimated and final financial aid packages are not unusual, but this year, some WSA members received complaints that one such discrepancy was over $10,000. According to Firke, unusually high discrepancies appear to be a recent concern.
“It was a problem I’d never heard about before at all,” he said. “No one else on the committee seemed to have heard about it either, so it seemed like something that might have been new.”
According to the Financial Aid Office, the discrepancies are a result of differences in tax reports. The estimates given out to ED students are based on tax returns from the previous year, while the final agreement is calculated from updated tax information from the year of acceptance.
“The award that a student applying for next year would receive in December is an estimated award, because we don’t have that final 2010 document indicating what they are ultimately eligible for,” said Sean Martin, Assistant Director of the Financial Aid Office. “In the spring, when they file their 2010 taxes, they’ll send us a copy so that we can finalize the award.”
If a student is accepted ED but finds that his or her final award does not make attending the University affordable, the student is no longer obligated to attend. However, only about one student per year declines to matriculate upon receipt of their final package, according to Senior Associate Dean of Admissions Greg Pyke.
Although the WSA has no plans to change financial aid policy, Firke expressed hope that the issue would be addressed.
“As Vice President, I understand how that can happen in terms of policy from the administration’s point of view,” Firke said. “There are only so many resources and sometimes things like that happen. But from a policy standpoint what I think needs to happen is some kind of effort from the Financial Aid Office to reduce this discrepancy. Whether that’s giving out lower estimates or trying to give more accurate indications right off the bat, whatever the policy may be, I think there needs to be some sort of change to that.”
The student forum was organized in anticipation of the Financial Aid Committee’s first meeting with the Financial Aid Office. According to Firke, the meeting was successful and resulted in numerous changes to the way the Office communicates via its website.
“We decided to discuss issues of communication, which seemed to be a really common problem that people were discussing,” he said. “There have been a few changes made on the website that should help students answer questions that they previously had.”
Since the meeting on Tuesday, the Financial Aid Office has prominently featured its office hours and staff contact information on its website and added additional features to its prospective and returning student application pages. The Financial Aid Office will also be looking into additional remedies to the situation, such as exploring alternative ways to calculate financial aid.
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