By Anne Hall
Senior Staff Writer
A Letter to the Editor was submitted Fall 2014 by Alexis Santiago, a Human Development major at CSUSM, in order to help her peers in finding awareness of challenges she’s had to face dealing with Financial Aid and trying to make it through paying for college on her own.
Santiago is a third year student on campus and works hard to submit her FAFSA on time. Like years prior, she communicated regularly with the Financial Aid Department to make sure that her paperwork was submitted properly and on time. In this particular case, Santiago brought her financial aid paperwork into the office directly on July 21, 2014.
“The copies were stamped and dated and the employee working specifically told me that it would take approximately seven to ten business days to process. On August 5, my status was still showing up on my To-Do List,” Santiago said.
When calling to follow up, Santiago was greeted with a notice that Financial Aid “did not have” her papers and the campus fee was due the very next day.
“That was $900 I did not have,” Santiago said. “I was put on hold several times throughout the process while I found the papers I had previously submitted and drove to Kinko’s and faxed the papers…,” Santiago said. “But little did I know, I sent it to the Cashier’s Office and not the Financial Aid Office (which are directly across the room from one another)…so the Financial Aid Office transferred me to Cashiers to have me ask them to walk the paperwork to the Financial Aid Office for me themselves.”
Santiago was left without her financial aid awards for five weeks after this event and was given the run around every time she contacted the office to get an update on the status of her awards.
“I was shocked to see that this was my first year not receiving any grants…a representative finally took the time to explain to me why I wasn’t receiving any grants and how to apply for loans and what I needed to do,” Santiago said.
Santiago was not approved for loans and has not received any type of financial aid since.
“I’ve numbed myself to accept it,” she said.
“Being the first generation in my family to attend college also dampers my hope that universities, especially my own, are not accommodating to those who don’t have affluent college-graduate parents, leaving us to feel guilty about not knowing the loan differentiations,” Santiago said. “This feeds into the social patriarchy for those who don’t necessarily need the grants, or even take out a loan through their college career to strive and have less stress (especially monetary stress), and those of us who are educated ourselves to better ourselves and our futures feeling helpless and unimportant.”
Santiago has worked various jobs in order to make her way through school, like many other students on campus. Because of the expenses caused by paying for her college experience, she, like many of her peers, has resorted to continue living with her parents to avoid extra expenses while in school. Even if she was to be approved for Financial Aid, as she was in the past, it would not change her personal life situation in terms of relying on her family and working to subsidize the expense of paying for college.
School expenses include tuition, added fees, books, school supplies, personal and transportation expenses, as well as cost of living. Paying these figures or putting ourselves into deeper debt by accepting student loans to pay for the expense later in life seems far less appealing since the promise of employment and careers immediately upon separation from college have been lacking over the past decade.
Employment rates have risen but much of that work is part-time and temporary through a large number of corporations including Amazon, The Department of Veterans Affairs and much more. Promising employment appears to exist in fields focused on technology, web development/design, software development, finance, various medical fields and environmental engineering. Sadly, CSUSM isn’t the greatest campus to attend in regards to seeking out futures within these fields.