This was the first year I’ve had to use a student loan to pay for my classes. I did everything accordingly to ensure that it was approved. HFCC confirmed that they had received it and successfully applied it to my tuition last semester—so no sweat.
This semester I was told that my loan would be automatically applied, and that I would be informed when it was applied and if there would be any out-of-pocket expense. This took a couple weeks last semester and I figured it would be the same for this one. And it was—except, instead of a letter telling me what I still owed the college, I got a letter telling me I had been dropped for not paying my tuition. Now, I didn’t enjoy the financial aid process but I dealt with it because I’m getting money (free or otherwise) so that I can afford to go to school and get my degree. That’s my plan and it’s a good one; unfortunately, getting dropped from my classes kind of screwed it up.
To resolve my problem, I went to the Financial Aid, Cashier, and Registration Offices to figure out what had happened. Had there been a problem with my loan? Nope. It had gone through and they didn’t tell me. Registration informed me that WebAdvisor has a section that lists my current tuition payments and any payments I had already made, so in their defense my situation could have been fixed right away had I known that I could look up my tuition on WebAdvisor.
On the other hand, isn’t it the school’s responsibility to inform me when my financial aid has been applied so that situations like mine can be avoided? Because they didn’t take two minutes to send me a letter (or an e-mail, since HFCC is going green), I was dropped from my classes without an explanation as to what had happened. I was forced to re-register and get signatures from my teachers that said I’d been attending class. The worst part is I’m not alone, this happens to dozens of students every semester. One of my teachers had a pen in her hand before I even explained the situation—stating that I was the fifth person to re-register for the class THAT DAY, and that the same thing had happened to at least a dozen of her students last semester. A manager in the Financial Aid Office admitted that they had a list of 10 students that were dropped from classes that should not have been.
Ridiculous!
Looking back, my situation wasn’t that complicated and could have been easily fixed if someone in the Financial Aid Office had sent me a confirmation letter, or if I had known to speak with a representative sooner regarding my tuition. But there are students whose situations are worse than mine--students who are dropped because they were never sent an e-mail or because “there was a glitch in the system.” These are ongoing problems that cannot be ignored and must be addressed. Do you want to have to re-register because of a glitch? I know I don’t.