Many students at West Texas A&M University have been experiencing difficulties in receiving their financial aid. The financial aid office is also having difficulties in giving the students their financial aid on time. The financial aid office has been looking for ways to improve so students can receive their financial aid.
“The biggest problem is the time,” Paul Lujan, senior English major, said.
Some students are submitting their financial aid in the months of May and June so they can receive their money when school starts in the fall semester, but are not receiving it until the end of September.
“I’m not getting it in a timely matter. I have to obviously pay for myself, rent, and utilities,” Lujan said. “I unfortunately have to ask my parents to pay for those things because unfortunately WT cannot supply those in a timely matter.”
Students like Ashley Godfrey, senior marketing business major, transferred to WT and have gone to bigger schools and never had a problem with receiving their financial aid on time.
“I went to a university with 36,000 students so you can do the math WT is way smaller than that and I got my aid quick and all of the people I knew that had aid there got it quick and there was never a problem with getting your aid,” Godfrey said. “Now at WT every semester I have a problem getting my aid. Every fall I’ve had a problem.”
In some cases, students are also submitting their documents in late making it difficult for them to receive their financial aid.
“It’s a major factor that the student has submitted their FASFA and other documents at a later point then many other students,” Dan Garcia, Vice President for Enrollment Management said. “What I often encounter is that I’ll have a student come to me and express concerns about not being awarded financial aid and when I look into when they’ve filed their FASFA it was the week before and we’re already in August and suddenly it becomes apparent that the submitted at a time when the staff are now trying process things that were submitted earlier by other students.”
The Financial Aid office can be at fault in some instances by misplacing a file or document.
“Occasionally there are other instances where there’s an error on the part of the financial aid department but they’re pretty good about it catching those but more often than not over the 7 years that I’ve been here it has been a case of submitting documentation late,” Garcia said.
The financial aid department is constantly trying to improve the system so students do not have a bad experience with not getting their financial aid in on time.
“I know there’s some students that aren’t having good experiences but I know that there are some errors made by the staff where they occasionally misplace a document, occasionally never received a document because of technology issue on our end,” Garcia said. “We understand that and recognize that and we don’t want students to experience that and that’s why we are constantly looking at ways to improve financial aid.”