Bang the Conundrum Slowly
Sep. 22nd, 2010 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogSome of life's realities make no sense.
The people who most need to save their money for an emergency or rainy day, can't. Those with the least need to do so, can.
Wikipedia will delete your entry if you're not considered "notable" enough, and it's mostly people already designated as "notable" who enforce that rule.
And closest to home today, it would appear that, unless you already have a college education sufficiently advanced to enable you to navigate a paying-for-college website, YOU CAN'T GO.
Fortunately, I have such an education already, but even for me, it was hard working through this latest morass with Emily's financial aid.
----
We collectively decided to change Em's meal plan a few weeks ago- supposedly no change in cost, but giving her more flexibility to use non-freshman-dining-hall options that fit her schedule and nurtition needs better. Sure enough, the minus and the plus cancelled each other out on the statement when I checked it earlier today, but there was an unpaid balance now showing for $1,800 and change above her financial aid, all but two pieces of which had finally come in.
Her two, rather small in the scheme of things, pieces. I emailed her to ask if she'd received any paperwork from the school or the gummint about it, much as I had for the pieces of her aid that I had to sign for (and which were credited on the bill). Turns out there was an email at her MyRIT account about that, listing some things she had to do. Well, go there and do what those things say, I said.
Phone calls followed. This was hard. She needed a PIN to do anything. Should she apply for one? Had she applied for one? I went to the site myself....
and wound up in Iowa.
www.studentloan.org, you see, is a very different site than studentloans.gov. Yet, even after getting past that fairly innocuous mistake, I found myself, two degrees and all, totally befuddled. She needed to sign a "master promissory note" online. Here's the screen you get when you follow the link RIT gave her:
Note anything missing from that page? How about something saying "NEXT," or "CLICK HERE WHEN READY," or anything of the sort.
They also told her she would have to have a live or online "entrance counseling" session about the importance of repaying her loans. (Curiously, parents, who in this as in most cases are (a) borrowing significantly more than she is and (b) are already way deeper in debt than the students are, do not have to take such counseling.) Here's the page for THAT:
Same thing; that's the full page that displays, and again, once you read the info, there's no continuation link to guide you on what to do next once you HAVE all that information assembled. It took a bunch of random clicking on my part to find a page with an actual "login" link, which I then duly transmitted to the child. I then had her try the PIN I'd set up for my own parent-loan account (fortunately, I violated all "strong password" ruulz and used the same one when I set up both, ages ago), which got her into the system; and she, from there, is presumably doing the rest.
But sheesh. What if your parents aren't fairly sophisticated computer users, and college grads? What happens, I expect, is that the school just sends Mom and Dad the bill for the undisbursed federal aid and figures they've just got it laying about someplace- and boots the kid out of classes if they don't pay.
It's not just the financial aid office that leaves kids to their own skills. A friend of ours, with a college-age granddaughter, got a new computer recently, and she mentioned that it was a lot less expensive than the Mac that the student needed to buy at the same time for her class requirements. In response to my question of "Where'd she get it?," I was told, "At the Apple Store." Nobody had told them that the school's bookstore, or any number of online places, would have sold the kid that same unit for a significantly lower "academic" price. Certainly the people at the Apple Store weren't going to offer that choice; they are Geniuses at that Bar, after all.
Somehow, I don't remember it being this hard when we paid for our tuition using sparkly jewels and stamps from the Ankh-Morpork post office back in the day.
The people who most need to save their money for an emergency or rainy day, can't. Those with the least need to do so, can.
Wikipedia will delete your entry if you're not considered "notable" enough, and it's mostly people already designated as "notable" who enforce that rule.
And closest to home today, it would appear that, unless you already have a college education sufficiently advanced to enable you to navigate a paying-for-college website, YOU CAN'T GO.
Fortunately, I have such an education already, but even for me, it was hard working through this latest morass with Emily's financial aid.
----
We collectively decided to change Em's meal plan a few weeks ago- supposedly no change in cost, but giving her more flexibility to use non-freshman-dining-hall options that fit her schedule and nurtition needs better. Sure enough, the minus and the plus cancelled each other out on the statement when I checked it earlier today, but there was an unpaid balance now showing for $1,800 and change above her financial aid, all but two pieces of which had finally come in.
Her two, rather small in the scheme of things, pieces. I emailed her to ask if she'd received any paperwork from the school or the gummint about it, much as I had for the pieces of her aid that I had to sign for (and which were credited on the bill). Turns out there was an email at her MyRIT account about that, listing some things she had to do. Well, go there and do what those things say, I said.
Phone calls followed. This was hard. She needed a PIN to do anything. Should she apply for one? Had she applied for one? I went to the site myself....
and wound up in Iowa.
www.studentloan.org, you see, is a very different site than studentloans.gov. Yet, even after getting past that fairly innocuous mistake, I found myself, two degrees and all, totally befuddled. She needed to sign a "master promissory note" online. Here's the screen you get when you follow the link RIT gave her:
Note anything missing from that page? How about something saying "NEXT," or "CLICK HERE WHEN READY," or anything of the sort.
They also told her she would have to have a live or online "entrance counseling" session about the importance of repaying her loans. (Curiously, parents, who in this as in most cases are (a) borrowing significantly more than she is and (b) are already way deeper in debt than the students are, do not have to take such counseling.) Here's the page for THAT:
Same thing; that's the full page that displays, and again, once you read the info, there's no continuation link to guide you on what to do next once you HAVE all that information assembled. It took a bunch of random clicking on my part to find a page with an actual "login" link, which I then duly transmitted to the child. I then had her try the PIN I'd set up for my own parent-loan account (fortunately, I violated all "strong password" ruulz and used the same one when I set up both, ages ago), which got her into the system; and she, from there, is presumably doing the rest.
But sheesh. What if your parents aren't fairly sophisticated computer users, and college grads? What happens, I expect, is that the school just sends Mom and Dad the bill for the undisbursed federal aid and figures they've just got it laying about someplace- and boots the kid out of classes if they don't pay.
It's not just the financial aid office that leaves kids to their own skills. A friend of ours, with a college-age granddaughter, got a new computer recently, and she mentioned that it was a lot less expensive than the Mac that the student needed to buy at the same time for her class requirements. In response to my question of "Where'd she get it?," I was told, "At the Apple Store." Nobody had told them that the school's bookstore, or any number of online places, would have sold the kid that same unit for a significantly lower "academic" price. Certainly the people at the Apple Store weren't going to offer that choice; they are Geniuses at that Bar, after all.
Somehow, I don't remember it being this hard when we paid for our tuition using sparkly jewels and stamps from the Ankh-Morpork post office back in the day.
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no subject
Date: 2010-09-23 01:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-23 05:05 am (UTC)My parents did zero to support me financially when I entered higher education. They could have--just didn't feel the burning desire to do so.
In my day, way back in 1985, the big ripoff was the university bookstore. It was the only location where the books for classes were sold (in that very large city). A student bought a Systems & Methods of Personality book, for say $95. Occasionally, that book could be purchased used, for say $89. I do remember the mean amount I would receive for each book, when selling it back to the university bookstore, was $5.
There's always, always a racket.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-23 10:21 am (UTC)Since the bookstore offered similar-to-what-you-got prices for returned books, the win-win solution was for students to work the line, selling last semester's Chem 101 tome to this semester's student.
The bookstore's response to this was to call in the county cops and threaten to arrest the sellers for unlawful peddling.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-23 02:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-23 02:38 pm (UTC)Maybe they're the ones who should be getting all my Viagra spam.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-23 02:48 pm (UTC)