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Dear West Virginia University,
Hello! I’m Average Student—it’s so nice to finally meet you. I’m sorry about my presumption, but I thought it would be prudent to introduce myself, since apparently you haven’t noticed me recently. I’m hoping you might be interested in what’s going on in my life, as well as in the lives of my dear cousins NonTrad Student and Poor Student.
When I went to check my mail today, I was relieved that it was finally, finally time for my financial aid disbursement to arrive. It was really getting down to the wire! I remember a few years ago, I used to get my check on the Thursday before classes started, which left me with three days to get important things done before I had to spend all day in classes. There was nothing in the mail yesterday, though. Oh well--I’m sure you’ve been very busy recently, and you just fell behind. No big deal; I knew it would be here today. Getting it on a Friday makes it a tight squeeze, of course, because my mailman doesn’t get here until 4:00, and my credit union closes at 4:30, but hey, that’s college life. It’s nothing if not fast-paced and frantic.
Imagine my surprise and dismay when I met my mailman at the door, and he had nothing for me except for a couple of advertising circulars and a bill.
I suppose I should have known that this would happen. After all, you did the same thing to me last semester. At the time, I thought it was some kind of administrative fluke, but I guess this is the new standard. Since you don’t seem to have considered the repercussions of this new operating procedure upon us, the lowly students, please allow me to illuminate the situation.
Like many, many other in-state students, my family is poor. I mean really poor. Let’s just say that if the government started selling gold nuggets for a dollar a dozen, the best my family could do would be to say, “Damn, the price is good!” They certainly don’t have any money to help me out of a jam. And oh, have you ever placed me into a jam. You see, I am signed up for a class that requires a $650 “travel fee” payment to be made by class time on Monday, or else I will be summarily force-dropped from the course--no exceptions. Unfortunately, since it appears that my check is not going to be at my home until 3:30 pm on Monday afternoon (and another of your "brilliant" policies prevents me from picking it up from Student Accounts in person,) this presents an enormous problem for me. My family cannot loan me the money temporarily, because they simply do not have it to loan. So...do I skip the very first day of classes in order to wait on my check, frantically rush to the credit union to cash it, and then rush back to campus to pay...or do I attend my classes and end up being dropped from one of them because I didn’t have my payment in on time? Decisions, decisions.
But perhaps you don’t sympathize much. I mean, after all--somewhere in the fine print, it says that you don’t have to give us our disbursements until the “first week” of classes...right? If that is indeed the case, then I can only assume that you fully intend to firmly communicate that policy to the rest of the University, so that no student is expected to be able to pay the expenses for a class before they’ve even received their financial aid. That seems only fair. I mean, this is West Virginia. It’s not like you didn’t know that quite a significant percentage of your students come from poor families. Surely when making policy choices, you consider the hardships that are so commonly faced by students from your own state...don’t you?
My cousin NonTrad Student has requested that I relay her dilemma, since we’re talking so frankly. You see, she’s a single mother who’s killing herself trying to handle college, a family, a home life, and a job--all at the same time. Her financial aid disbursement is vitally important to her, because it is a desperately-needed injection of capital into her scary-tight budget. And wouldn’t you know it, her refrigerator died just last night. She was counting on her financial aid to get here today, because she needs to get another refrigerator in the most urgent way, and since those are rather expensive, she cannot just buy one with a normal paycheck. Right now, she has $300 worth of Food Stamp-purchased groceries sitting in coolers, on ice, because she has no functional refrigerator. And of course, the checks did not get here today, and likely will not be here until Monday, by which time a large portion of her frozen food will be ruined. It’s going to be an upsetting and expensive weekend for NonTrad and her family, I’m afraid.
Still, I’m sure you can’t base your policies on what’s in the best interests of students like NonTrad, because obviously getting the checks earlier would be detrimental to all of the other students at WVU! Or...err...hmm. By golly, I guess it wouldn’t be detrimental to everyone else. In fact, I can’t see how anyone else would be ill-served in the slightest. Well then, I’m sure you have some complex, bureaucratic excuse that’s far more important than the real, tangible needs of actual human beings. Or something.
As for my cousin Poor Student, she wanted me to remind you that you certainly don’t wait until the first week of classes to take your share of our financial aid disbursements. In fact, you’ve taken your share long before we ever see a penny of ours. I think that the key misunderstanding in this situation is that, when it comes right down to it, we students are not nearly as untrustworthy and unreliable as you seem to think we are. You really don’t have to wait until (quite literally) the last possible moment to give us our financial aid. We aren’t mindless, ravening, keg-devouring beasts who will explode in a frenzy of student-aid-purchased alcohol if you give us our checks a few days early. Truly, the vast, vast majority of us are not that intensely stupid, no matter what stereotypes about college students you might have heard recently. We don’t need you to play Nanny with our money in order to save us from ourselves. Frankly, I think some of us could use a hard, adult lesson about what happens when you spend money frivolously, but that’s neither here nor there.
In closing, I’d just like to say that basing universal policies on the behavior problems of a scant handful of students is inherently unfair, and seriously detrimental to the well-being of quite a few of the rest of us. In the meantime, please--whatever changes you made to your policies that have resulted in financial aid checks not being delivered until utterly the last moment, please consider a reversal. It’s difficult enough to be a lowly student from a poor family, much less a single mother. This small bit of effort on your part has the potential to make an enormous positive difference in the lives of a significant number of your students, with no negative effect on anyone else at all. When checks are mailed out in a timely fashion (“timely” being defined as “early enough to actually cash them before the first day of classes”) there are no losers. Everybody's needs are met, and everybody wins.
It was nice to meet you. We’ll have to try and talk more often, yes?
Sincerely,
Average Student
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:banghead: :grr: :cry: :grr: :banghead:
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