With college costs on the rise since the ’60s, many students across the country have been looking to their dedicated financial aid offices to provide help in the strenuous financial transition that comes with college. Every once in a while, a reassuring gesture of stability can go a ong way. For students at Prairie View A&M, however, such a dream represents the ironic musings of a utopian, unattainable future. Even walking along the sidewalks of the University College reveals the torment of most incoming freshmen and their experiences with the ‘ever developing department.’ As if the department’s seemingly rampant incompetence wasn’t enough, most students had to bear reading an article in The Panther which, though it spoke of the financial aid office in a seemingly objective light, failed to expose the weaknesses of the department.
The promised ‘vast improvements’ in the processing speed of students has yet to come about, as I still often find myself in the company of scores of other waiting students in the stuffiness of the third floor of the Memorial Student Center. The financial aid office may have expanded its staff, but it certainly has not made any improvements to its gross inefficiency. In that sense the old adage holds true; “the bureaucracy is often expanding to support the expanding bureaucracy.”
To exacerbate the situation, the sole problem lies not with the inefficiency of most of the financial aid counselors (how many times must we sit through the ‘we lost your paperwork, and you’re going to have to send it again, because, of course, our losing your paperwork is your fault’ speech?), the lack of sympathy the front desk clerks regard the common student with is enough to drive one to violence.
The problem, as the administrators of the financial aid office may have missed, is not the lack of staff, but the lack of concern. Perhaps students would be less apt to criticize the office so often if we were regarded with a little more poise and respect.
Prairie View students could take our encounters with our dear dear office with a grain of sugar, as it were. Perhaps our future selves will be able to look back on these experiences and our youthful, impatient outbursts and laugh. For now, however, I think we just need a financial aid office which can get us our money before we’re all dropped!
-Name Withheld