Recently, President Wiseman emailed all MAP grant recipients at Saint Xavier (1,600 students), informing them that they need to make an appointment with the school’s financial aid office. The point of these meetings? To determine how exactly we are going to help the school and pay back the funds that they fronted to us for MAP grants.
If you are reading this and are unaware of the situation that is going on with MAP funding, we will give it to you bluntly. Illinois has not passed a state budget for the 2015-2016 fiscal period, which puts MAP grants in jeopardy. These MAP grants that are given to many students in need are not being funded and so many universities (including Saint Xavier) put forth the money to allow students to be able to continue going to college.
The hope was that the school would be paid back, however it doesn’t look like that’s happening anytime soon considering the state has been without a budget for around nine months now. Saint Xavier now wants their $6.6 million back from the students. And they want us to figure out our situations sooner rather than later.
As one staff member of The Xavierite experienced, when you make an appointment with the Financial Aid office, you are given three options: a PLUS loan (which is loan your parents take out), you take out a private loan or increase an existing one, or pay the money out of pocket. You also have to decide by around April 15 which option you are going to take.
Our problem here at The Xavierite is not just that we have to pay back money that we never expected to have to pay back in the first place. Instead, it is that the students were completely blindsided. Which is an inconsistent message to students considering in the October 21, 2015 edition of The Xavierite, Susan Swisher, executive director of financial aid, told us that would not happen.
“No students will be blindsided, once we find out what is going to happen, we will communicate with them to figure out how we can work with them,” Swisher said (Future of MAP Grants Unknown, v. 85 (5)).
Considering that Saint Xavier has known there has been no state budget since the first of July, they have had plenty of time to give students forewarning that we would possibly need to make arrangements to pay back this extra money. Even if they had warned us in January of 2016 that this was a possibility, it would have been better than giving us less than a month to decide our fate.
While some students feel as if these implications were apparent by the emails presented throughout the school year in regards to the campaigns and rallies surrounding the MAP grants, many on staff would have appreciated more detail and transparency in regards to these contingency plans before the end of the school year.
The Xavierite Editorial Staff
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