BY MARTHA MARRAZZA

In print | Published October 23, 2008 — Updated December 03, 2008 23:11

Offering need-based financial aid is a priority at Swarthmore, where more than 50 percent of students receive assistance and the average need-based award is $34,600.

However, several students were unable to return to Swarthmore this semester because of financial and other issues, and they and others have expressed concern over different elements of the financial aid process in recent weeks.

Dan Goes ’11 said he was unable to return to Swarthmore because the Financial Aid Office sharply decreased his award from last year.

“The Financial Aid office was very late with my award, and when I got my package my family and I were floored to find that it was significantly less than last year,” he said. “The amount of money we earned didn’t go up significantly, but somehow last year’s package vanished.”

Director of Financial Aid Laura Talbot said students are rarely unable to return to Swarthmore as a result of financial difficulties. “It’s very rare that students can’t come back to Swarthmore because of financial aid,” Talbot said.

Amy Smolek ’11 also received her financial aid package late in the summer, but she and her family were able to scramble and pay the bill. “I didn’t get my financial aid package until three days before we were supposed to pay,” Smolek said. “After emailing and calling for the past few months asking the Financial Aid office to send us our package, when we got it, it was much less than we had hoped for.”

“I wrote a letter since some aspects of our financial situation had changed, and I was hoping that they would be able to take that into account, but they were not,” Smolek said. “They said they could offer me more loans, so I took them up on that because I didn’t want my mom to shoulder the burden of my increased tuition.”

Candice Nguyen ’11 initially came to Swarthmore in part because her financial aid award was more generous than some of the public schools she was considering, but a recent decrease in her Financial Aid package is preventing her from returning to Swarthmore next semester, or for the remainder of her college career.

“The second week of July, we received a letter from Swarthmore saying, ‘This is what you owe,’ and it was twice as much as I owed last year, so I thought it was a mistake,” Nguyen said. “During the time I was in college my father was able to obtain a job, but it represented less than a third of the increase in what was requested of us by Swarthmore, proportionate to the amount that we paid last year, so we assumed it was a mistake.”

“We sent emails, we called … Between my father and me, we left three voicemails with the Financial Aid Office, none of which were returned,” Nguyen said.

“We finally got a letter, which was just a formality, at the beginning of August, seven days before the payment deadline, telling me that if I was interested in taking time off or transferring as a result of the financial aid package, best of luck to me,” Nguyen said. “It was difficult to deal with, mainly because I had seven days to figure out what I was going to do for the semester. It was too late to even sign up for community college.”

Talbot said that applications that are incomplete or turned in late may affect the Financial Aid Office’s turnaround time for issuing student packages. “If returning students submit their financial aid applications by the end of April, they usually hear from us by the end of June,” Talbot said. “Our reading may be delayed when follow up questions need answering.”

Meeting 100 Percent of Student Need?

Some students facing unusual or untraditional circumstances at home have experienced trouble in securing financial aid.

After depleting an $80,000 trust fund from her relatives during her first two years at Swarthmore, Greta Pittenger ’10 determined that she will be unable to return to the college. “I had enough money in my account for two years at Swarthmore without financial assistance, and Financial Aid led me to believe that if I spent my money during the first two years, they would help me stay at Swarthmore,” Pittenger said. “This year I got hardly any financial aid. As of right now, I won’t be able to return to Swarthmore. I’m completely broke. My parents didn’t plan on having to pay [for college] because I already had the fund.”

Pittenger appealed to the Financial Aid Office for additional funding this year, but she said they were unable to increase her award.

“I got very little aid this year, and my personal expected contribution from my assets was $20,000, but I have no assets left. I used them all,” Pittenger said. “There are a lot of individual situations that for one reason or another, parents can’t contribute. I think it’s unreasonable for all colleges to expect that parents are going to cover all of their child’s education.”

Talbot said that relying on parents and families to support students is standard practice at colleges and universities throughout the country. “First we assess the family’s capacity to pay and then we fill the gap between the student’s cost of education and the family’s capacity to pay,” she said. “We deal with a family’s capacity to pay, not what they wish to pay.”

Besides considering the FAFSA and tax return information, Swarthmore has a financial aid supplement form to better address specific needs and circumstances. “Swarthmore’s assessment of parents’ fair share contribution includes our sensitivity to differences in the cost of living in different areas of the country; to parents’ ages; to their needs for retirement protection; to upcoming college expenses for younger siblings; to elder care and child care expenses; to extraordinary medical expenses; to decreases in asset values; and to job losses,” Talbot said.

There are some tricky issues that can affect award amounts, however. Nguyen found scholarship money to supplement her financial aid award this year, but she said that under Swarthmore policy, a generous outside scholarship would not improve her situation.

“I thought I could fix this situation by coming up with an enormous amount of scholarship money. I contacted the Mavis Leno foundation…and she gave me a $15-20,000 scholarship. It was incredible,” Nguyen said. “It turns out that once you exceed the student contribution, capped at $3,650, every dollar you obtain over that is reduced from your financial aid package. So I turned down the Mavis Leno foundation scholarship because it would have done nothing for me,” Nguyen said.

According to the Financial Aid Handbook, students who receive merit-based outside scholarships will have their aid awards adjusted. “Since your demonstrated need has been met with our aid, any additional outside aid must replace a portion of our award to you.

“Outside aid cannot replace parent contribution, since that figure represents parents’ capacity to contribute from their income and assets,” according to the handbook.

While many students acknowledge that Swarthmore is accommodating of fluctuating financial circumstances, some have expressed frustration that Swarthmore doesn’t take new circumstances into account in a timely enough manner.

“Special circumstances need to be taken into account,” Abe Bae ’11 said. “My grandma is badly ill, so my father had to unexpectedly go to Korea a few times this year. The Financial Aid office does know my situation, but they said they can’t do anything about that this year. That doesn’t help me right now, though. I mean, you always hear about our $1.2 billion endowment or whatever it’s up to now, but what does that mean for us? There is a disconnect,” Bae said.

Associate Dean for Student Life Myrt Westphal said Swarthmore can only make financial aid decisions in light of the year’s tax returns.

“Circumstances change, and it’s tricky. Someone can lose a job and then get another one two weeks later. That’s why we look at the calendar year based on tax returns,” Westphal said.

“There are so many imponderables. Financial aid needs a longer time horizon. Financial aid can’t bounce up and down every month or every three months because of circumstances that might change,” Westphal said. “Saying the college should cover every difficulty in each family is too much.
“The college is trying to be a steward of money for everybody,” she said.

Genise Choy ’09 said her dealings with Financial Aid over the past four years at Swarthmore have been overwhelmingly positive.

“I have to say that every time I’ve interacted with the Financial Aid Office it’s been a positive experience. They’ve always been very kind to me,” she said. “They’ve always given me a very nice package.”

Goes, however, said his experience with Financial Aid this semester seems to contradict the college’s advertised policy to fully meet student need. “Supposedly Swarthmore will meet 100 percent of demonstrated need, but I feel like that wasn’t the case this semester,” Goes said.

Talbot said the Financial Aid office does meet 100 percent of student need as determined by the college. “Our reading of financial aid applications is responsive, careful and generous. We know that money is a difficult issue for families. We offer as much aid as we can possibly justify,” she said. “Family decisions are so important in these things, though.”

Dean of Students Jim Larimore said that the fact that some students feel they are unable to return to Swarthmore because of financial reasons doesn’t necessarily contradict the college’s policy to meet 100 percent of student need.

“It all depends. I’ve seen situations where when you look at the expected family contribution, it’s easy to see the method applied,” he said.

Larimore said he understood a complex family situation could further complicate matters. “I’ve also seen some situations where it’s complicated, especially around divorces. It can put the student in an impossible situation, if a parent won’t pay or feels like they can’t pay even though they are obligated to,” Larimore said. “But it’s hard to say that it would be okay to ignore a parent’s ability to pay in some cases and award aid, because we might end up encouraging other parents to appeal to us for money when they can afford tuition. If you get parents saying they’re no longer willing to pay because they think someone else might take care of it, it’s a slippery slope.”

The Appeals Process

While financial aid decisions are made separate of the Dean’s Office, some students have appealed to the deans when distressed about their financial aid awards. “Students often find themselves with problems that might impact their ability to stay in school, and they often do contact the deans for advice. Even though we’re not directly involved in Financial Aid, we’re interested in helping students navigate the system,” Larimore said.

“I don’t know if deans should have a more direct role in the process because the rules applied are so complicated and we’re not really the ones who should be eligible to make those decisions,” Larimore said. “I’ve found that the folks in Financial Aid are responsive to advice and constructive feedback about how they might better approach a situation, though.”

Westphal said the Dean’s Office has little control over decisions made in the Financial Aid Office. “The appeals process is printed on the letter sent with the package. If students come to us, there’s not much we can do,” she said. “It’s frustrating because students hope that by appealing to the deans a different decision might come forth, but there’s usually nothing Financial Aid can do.”

Nguyen said she spoke with a variety of deans and administrators and even met with President Al Bloom to voice her concerns with financial aid at Swarthmore. “I’ve tried to make financial aid a more open discussion topic,” she said. “My situation isn’t unique. What’s unique about it is that, for one … I’m one of the students who [has] made the effort to speak to administrators about this. There’s a real feeling that because you don’t know how these numbers are calculated, you’ll be punished for questioning them. People have not come back, and when I asked why they hadn’t questioned their decision, they said that they didn’t know what would happen next.”

The Financial Aid Office has a formal appeals process in place that is detailed in the Financial Aid Handbook. According to this handbook, if the financial information initially provided was incomplete or incorrect, students are encouraged to write a letter to the Financial Aid Office detailing the new or corrected information. The Handbook states that “without new or corrected information, however, there will not be any basis for reconsideration.”

Despite the official policy, a few students have expressed confusion or frustration when discussing the financial aid appeals process.

“With the appeals process, you definitely have to take initiative. Without taking a strong initiative, you won’t get anything,” Bae said. “Even when you do push, you often don’t get anything more. The appeals process needs to be more transparent.”

Pittenger said she repeatedly tried to get through to the Financial Aid office over this summer and last summer, with little success. “I wrote Financial Aid a long letter explaining my situation. I tried to phone them many times to get through to someone, but it didn’t seem like they wanted to deal with me,” Pittenger said. “I didn’t call the office so much this summer because I was so frustrated last summer. I understand that there are tons of students to talk to and tons of packages to compose, but they claim to have a personal level of interaction with students and I’ve never been able to get through.”

Talbot said that, due to high traffic during the summer months, students are encouraged to write to the Financial Aid office to voice any concerns.

“Our robust Financial Aid Handbook and website offer answers to most questions, but we are happy to help families to navigate those resources,” Talbot said. “Our first aid decision is our best unless the information provided to us was not complete or was not correct. If a student has new or corrected information to provide us, we are happy to reconsider our decision.”

However, the Financial Aid office is staffed to meet student needs over the summer, Talbot said. “I’ve sometimes heard that people have trouble getting through to our office, but when I ask if they left a message, they say no,” Talbot said. “We have three people answering our main phone line. If a caller leaves a name and a number, our office returns the call.”

Smolek followed the office’s recommended appeal process even though she was unaware such a procedure was in place. “I am not really sure if there’s an official process to get your package changed. I just wrote a letter to Laura Talbot, she responded, and that was that,” Smolek said.

Like Bae, Nguyen said the Financial Aid Office should work to become more transparent. “A huge problem is that families don’t know how these numbers are generated. There’s no conversation. These numbers are literally cranked out behind closed doors,” she said. “If you’re going to give a family a package that they believe they can’t pay, the least you can do is explain how that number was calculated. It’s the idea of transparency and openness. You can’t even begin to refute a financial aid package unless you know the rationale behind it.”

Choy said many complaints with the Financial Aid Office stem from a misconception about financial aid at Swarthmore, since some students don’t expect their package to change from year to year.
“I don’t think any student expects it to happen, so when it does it’s more of a shock than perhaps if there had been guidelines sent out beforehand saying your aid might decrease in these cases,” she said. “It seems like students are really surprised in these cases and are never expecting this to happen.”

Nguyen’s experience speaks to the idea that some students expect to receive the same amount of aid from the college each year.

“We wouldn’t be having this conversation if I had received this package earlier, when I got in, or if I would have known that this would have happened,” she said. “Swarthmore makes bold statements about how they value their students … but it’s kind of shocking that it’s really taken out from beneath your feet once you get in. Through this process, it’s been ‘Candice, I can sleep at night because I only have this conversation with three or four kids per year.’”

Talbot said she and other members of the Financial Aid Office are open to dialogue about financial aid at Swarthmore. “If there are bad feelings about this process, let’s talk about it,” she said. “We hope families come to us with any concerns.”

Additional reporting by Yoel Roth

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