I had to move to a new city due to a custody issue with my child, and enrolled in community college. The out-of-state tuition was a lot, but my financial aid covered it so I didn’t believe there’d be any issue.
At the time, I was working four part-time jobs with a baby at home, but managing to get by. Toward the very end of the semester (past the withdrawal date) I very suddenly had to find somewhere new to live and also lost the roommate who had been providing me with transportation. I was desperately looking for a house and struggled immensely to get to work and school on the bus. I ended up failing all of my classes and lost my financial aid.
I now owe $12,000 due to the out-of-state tuition and full load I had been taking. I know it was my fault for taking on such a huge load – but I really did not expect my circumstances to so suddenly change late in the semester. Now I feel like I’m utterly screwed.
I can’t continue at this school, and my transcripts won’t be released for me to begin anywhere else. I’m a single parent in a high cost-of-living city with no support and I can’t imagine how many years it would take to pay off this one measly first semester I began.
I don’t mean to be dramatic, but this seems like the biggest mistake of my life. I’ll never make much more money without going back to school, but it’ll be years before I can pay it off in order to go back to school. I had no guidance after high school and enrolled in college ready to work hard…I don’t think I fully understood what I was getting into.
I am sorry that all of this happened to you. However there is no way around it. You need to talk to your school about setting up a payment plan. What you don’t want to have happen is for it to go to collections.
Ah, I guess that’s an important point – even the payment plan they had offered was far above anything I’d be able to pay (it was about $2000/month). So the account went to collections.
I suggest you seek some low cost or no cost legal advice for consideration of whether you could shed this debt via a declaration of personal bankruptcy, Student loans aren’t dischargeable in bankruptcy, but tuition debt is, and I think you’d need advice from someone with a consumer debt specialty to parse out your particular situation. Of course the impact of bankruptcy on other aspects of your life would also have to be looked at closely. If that’s not a good option, keep in mind that collection agencies will bargain. They’d rather receive something than nothing. You might be able to reduce the amount of the debt and develop a workable payment schedule once they see that they can’t get blood from a stone.
From the FSA Handbook:
When students fail to earn a passing grade in any class
An institution must have a procedure for determining whether a Title IV recipient who began attendance during a period completed the period or should be treated as a withdrawal. We do not require that an institution use a specific procedure for making this determination. If a student earns a passing grade in one or more of his or her classes
offered over an entire period, for that class, an institution may presume that the student completed the course and thus completed the period. If a student who began attendance and has not officially withdrawn fails to earn a passing grade in at least one course offered over an entire period, the institution must assume, for Title IV purposes, that the student has unofficially withdrawn, unless the institution can document that the student completed the period.
Did you actually complete your courses? For example, did you take the finals & fail? If so, you should contact your financial aid office to document that you did, in fact, “earn” your F (you did not unofficially withdraw) - you might be able to have the federal aid reinstated. If you really didn’t finish, then yes, the aid had to be remove.