Why Is This So Hard?
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Education
The first thing you do is fill out a form called a FAFSA, which stands for “For Always Forgetting Students, Always.” You give it some pretty basic information, including your Social Security number, your tax papers for the past year, your parents’ Social Security numbers, where they were born, every parking ticket you’ve ever received, number of times you have sneezed in the past three months, and so on. The whole process can take between two to four weeks, depending on how anal retentive. You then politely ask the Federal Government, who kindly provided you with this form to fill out (big surprise), to send it along to the schools you have applied for.
Well, a few weeks later, you’ve been excepted to a school and are attending there in the Fall. Good for you. But wait, you have to consult with Financial Aid advisors from that school because you don’t have $85,000 to spend on your education. So, you consult with Financial Aid only to discover that for some reason, they don’t have a record of your FAFSA which you kindly asked the Government to send along. You call the school and talk to everyone in the Student Services Department, including several Janitors, until someone finally informs you that the FAFSA they have received from you was not filled out correctly.
So, you have to go back to the FAFSA, and sort through the metric ton of information, and at some point you realize how most of the stuff you gave them are completely irrelevant to getting Financial help with school, nevertheless. You find the one little bit of the form that was wrong, fix it, and then kindly ask the Government (who you hate now) to send the updated form to the school of your choice. By the way, even though they can now do this electronically, it takes even longer then filling it out longhand, and mailing it, for them to process the whole darn thing.
Which brings me to my next point. The school will then take all the time they need to make you an offer. An offer that will be crap by the way. They will offer you a bunch of loans that will have interest applied to them shortly after you graduate. For some reason, it is in the best interest of the school to insure that you enter the workforce already in debt. You are already in debt even before you buy a house, a car, start a family. How does this make sense?
The way I see it, if the Government wants to get out of this economic crisis, then the Government needs to get rid of the FAFSA and Stafford, and the PLUS loans, because they do not work. Here’s an idea, how about putting more money into public Colleges and Universities so that they can lower tuitions? Oh wait, they’ve tried that, it didn’t work. So, here’s a real idea. Give anyone, and I mean anyone, who has been excepted into a College or University an interest free, Government guaranteed, loan. Let’s let everyone who wants to go to college, go to college, and to make the Financial situation a little easier. Hey, if they’re going to throw money at Chase and Citi, why not throw some money to the people who actually have to live with the choices being made today? If anyone deserves the money from TARP and the AIG bailout, it’s the people who are now screwed by the bankers and Insurance people who got us into this mess.
So long as the loan terms require you taking a class called “Ethics in Financial Services” or something to that effect.
