The day before fall fees were due, the Financial Aid Office called Valinda Coffey and said her scholarship money had arrived. When she finally got to talk to someone after going through a plethora of busy signals and recorded messages, the customer service person said everything was fine and told her when to register.
When Coffey, a junior political science major, went to register, the money wasn’t there.
Coffey had already waited a month-and-a-half to get to this point. She had received the award letter and notification that her money was in the mail. Turns out, she hadn’t formally accepted her award.
What confused Coffey was the lack of information given to her when she talked to the customer service employee. She had never been given a scholarship before. When the employee told her everything was fine, she took it as the truth and didn’t think she needed to do anything else.
Many other students have complained over the misinformation given to them by the staff of the Financial Aid Office. Although the office with these seemingly routine problems everyday, there are many students on campus who rely on financial aid to come to Augusta State University.
Willene Holmes, director of Financial Aid, said the customer service staff of the office are hired to answer phone calls and receive documents. She said they “have enough knowledge about the application process and the documents to answer the questions intelligently. But as far as them actually processing the verification, they can’t do it. I have another team of verification individuals to do that.”
“Often times, even though we are receiving documents across the counter, when we look at the record in the computer, they may look like the student is complete and we have everything,” Holmes said.
Nikki Skinner, a sophomore journalism and photography double major, said her experience with the customer service staff of the office wasn’t very pleasant.
“They don’t know as much, so they kind of go and tell you to do stuff, and then, in the end, you’ve got this whole runaround and it was pointless,” Skinner said.
Skinner turned in her tax information four times this year. After it was lost repeatedly, she finally refused to leave the office as she watched an employee with the customer service staff file her information.
“I didn’t get to register till a week before school, and I lost my drawing class,” she said.
Skinner said she started her academic career as Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Ga. She said she never had a single issue with their financial aid department.
Holmes said many of the perceived mistakes made by Financial Aid can be attributed with a logjam of FAFSA’s that appear late to her office. What has happened is that even though the financial aid deadline is on April 1 each year, many students don’t turn it in until well into the summer. She said although many students do not have their tax information ready by then, they can turn that in later than the FAFSA. She said in 2008, from July 15 to August 15, she received 859 FAFSA forms.
“I want the largest volume of applications to come into us January, February, March, April,” Holmes said. “That is not happening, and unfortunately many people don’t even start thinking about financial aid until July and August. They realize, ‘Oh, my fees are due next month. I haven’t done my FAFSA.’”
One of the frequent complaints is the phone line always being busy. Skinner said she tried repeatedly to get through on the phone before coming to the office and talking to an employee in-person.
According to Holmes this is due to only have two phone lines in the office. Any more, she said, and they will have to establish a call center, which her budget will not allow.
Holmes said no one is perfect and it would be much easier to conduct business if she had a vault of money with no application process. With a stringent process, and a hot office, with few seats and long waits, she said it makes for an environment where students or parents can get testy.
“We will not accept a student or parent raising their voices at us, or shouting profane language, because we do neither,” Holmes said. “We don’t have to. First of all, we are providing a service. It’s all about supply and demand.”
That kind of environment changed this year during peak registration period. While once students complained of waiting in the hot Financial Aid Office to get help, she expedited that process by moving her operation to University Hall.
According to Holmes, between August 11and August 19, they helped 2.349 students in University Hall. On August 17 alone, Financial Aid assisted 520 students. At the very most, she said, students had to wait 20 minutes. After that the students were able to get access to a computer and with as many as eight members of the Financial Aid Office staff available.
“My office, where we are presently located, is just simply not conducive to the traffic that we have,” Holmes said. “It gets hot up here. We don’t have enough seats.”
Also, she said, the building is not accessible for students with disabilities.
“(The building) is not ADA accessible,” she said. “My staff and I have to go downstairs, or sometimes if the lift isn’t working in the building, we have to go outside, in the rain, in the cold, in the heat, to assist a physically challenged student. That’s not a complaint….We don’t mind doing that. We welcome that.”
Along with everything else, Holmes said it also seemed as if the students were happier than usual while taking care of their financial aid needs in the cooler environment of the University Hall computer lab, which she calls Financial Aid Central.
“It was very cool, temperature-wise.” she said. “People were in a good mood. My staff, we were kidding and cutting up with the students. They were coming in joking with us. So, I think when you’re hot, people get kind of irritable, and plus, there wasn’t a long wait.”
Many students think due to the misinformation they have received that Financial Aid is crawling with student assistants. This, Holmes said, is not true. She said she has three full-time customer service employees, and four more full-time employees that can work the service desk whenever is needed. Four students are employed in the office, but only one works in customer service.
Many of the mistakes made by Financial Aid can be credited to mistakes students make when either them or their parents are filling out a FAFSA. Holmes said a FAFSA should be treated as a family project.
“I think a lot of it is, people are rushing,” Holmes said. “They’re in a hurry when they are online, and I think that if either the students fill out their forms out by themselves, or the parents are filling out the forms by themselves. Applying for financial aid is a family endeavor.”