On March 14, students who receive MAP grants were sent an email by the office of President Christine Weisman advising them to meet with the Financial Aid Office to cover the costs allocated by the school to fill in for the missing grants.
According to the email sent out by Wiseman: “To date, Saint Xavier has allowed all 1,600 of its MAP recipients to continue their education, uninterrupted by the State’s failure to approve a budget. That is endemic to our Mercy Mission. But now, as we near the end of our spring semester, measures must be taken by all of us to cover those funds.”
Students who would receive the MAP grant have been advised to schedule a meeting with the Office of Financial Aid by April 1. For clarification, this doesn’t mean that students have to meet with the Office of Financial Aid by April 1; rather, they should have scheduled the meeting by this point.
Wiseman also stressed that this current situation will not affect students anticipating graduation to continue on that path and receive their transcripts. Also, continuing students are encouraged to register for summer and fall classes – taking into consideration that continuing students have met with the Office of Financial Aid and are following the appropriate response to their own current financial situation.
For students who rely on these grants, however, the reality of what paying this money back means has in some cases been an ordeal. Freshman Sean Anderson described his initial feelings when the news broke to him.
“It was rough to deal with it. Telling my mom [was hard]. It’s a struggle to go here anyways, so now it’s just more of a struggle,” Anderson said.
Anderson said that he was promptly able to get a meeting with those in the Office of Financial Aid and sooth his panic on the situation.
However, in order to properly remedy the situation, Anderson will probably need to get a supplementary job in addition to his current position as a student worker at WXAV and return to a former retail job in order to recoup the losses that have been incurred by the potential disappearance of his grant.
“It was crushing to hear that [my MAP grant] was taken away and it was crushing that it’s going to take away from my education because I’m going to be focusing on my job and that’s going to take away from homework time and my job here…. To get an education is important. It’s something I need to do,” Anderson said.
For senior Linda Boulton, the MAP grant was one of the key reasons that she decided to attend Saint Xavier University. She has yet to meet with the Office of Financial Aid and is still uncertain of what her financial plan will be moving forward. “I probably wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t have a MAP grant. I would’ve chosen somewhere less expensive to go….” Boulton said.
Boulton wishes that she would’ve been informed at the beginning of the semester that she would potentially have to pay the money back. Boulton also felt blindsided by the fact that MAP grants allocated in the fall are also retroactively due as well.
“I feel…in January we definitely should’ve gotten a warning….I feel like that was very misleading and I feel like, maybe if it had been half I could pay that back, but it’s the whole thing,” Boulton said.
Boulton was generally displeased with the communication that took place on the issue. “I feel like there really hasn’t been any communication about it. In all of the correspondence about getting the MAP funding…[the emails] were very generic,” Boulton said acknowledging that while she was well aware of the campaigns that had taken place, such as rallies and digital campaigns, she did not feel informed of the implications of what would happen if MAP grants remained unfunded.
While not having attended the rallies down in Springfield for the MAP grant, Boulton did participate in a digital campaign by emailing Governor Bruce Rauner and received quote “a generic email” in response.
Anderson, however, was more satisfied with the communication that took place in order to notify students about the situation. “I feel I was informed fairly well. Probably like a B,” Anderson said, grading communication about the matter.
At the State of the University Address, Wiseman spoke about why these contingency plans were not being discussed earlier within the semester. According to Wiseman, one of the reason for these plans having not been communicated earlier was the vagueness of the situation at the end of the fall.
“Nobody was talking about the lack of MAP funding, except in general terms, in the fall,” Wiseman said.There was still a chance that MAP grants could have gone through earlier this month and that the university did not want to incite any sort of panic for a situation that can still be resolved.
“It became apparent when the last bills failed [in early March] that it was pretty serious. Here’s the thing: all of this may be for naught if the state comes through….I don’t think there was anyone who expected that the state of Illinois would be without a budget,” Wiseman said.
For Anderson, however, this whole affair has provided him with a lesson in keeping informed politically. “[Students] need to pay more attention to politics….It’s the Illinois government that’s at fault here,” Anderson said.
For more information on the State of the University Address, please check our website www.thexavierite.com at the end of this week for a full and complete breakdown. We will also re-run this story in our next issue.
Brian Laughran
Editor-in-Chief
About Post Author
