<p>This is a rant - I just have to get this off my chest.</p>
<p>I have one child still in college, a rising junior, and for a number of reasons our financial situation has changed, and we are anxiously awaiting his financial aid award to see what our financial liability will be for next year. He is actually spending the summer on campus, 3 hours away. For what it's worth, we have always been relatively private with our kids about the details of our finances, income, net worth, etc. </p>
<p>I checked his school website and saw that financial aid awards would be posted to the student's private messaging system towards the end of June. I called his school and was told that yes, his award is there. However, there is no way for us, his parents, to access it without logging in to his account. I asked if they could forward the details of the award to me, they said, no, the only way for us to see his award is if we log into his account. They aren't allowed to send it to us due to "privacy laws". As a matter of fact, even HE can't forward the information to us as it's not in any format that can be forwarded. He needs to hand over his password and allow us to log into his account if we are to see how his award breaks down and what our financial obligation is for the next school year.</p>
<p>OK, what kind of privacy laws are these and who are they protecting?? They are not protecting us, the people responsible for paying the bill, from having our financial information disclosed to our child. And they are not protecting him, the student, from having to give his parents access to his private messaging account if he wants us to be able to pay his bill. </p>
<p>I don't get it. Is it just my son's school, or are they all hiding the awards from the parents this year? How is this supposed to work in situations where there are contentious relationships already between parent and child? What the heck is the point???</p>
<p>They are protecting the student’s rights that he got upon turning 18. He did not get the right at that time, however to legally drink beverages with alcohol, or be considered independent for financial aid purposes at colleges. Crazy? Yep. But that is the law.</p>
<p>My son is on our insurance, which we pay, I often take him to the doctors, pay the copay and out of network amounts, take the prescription to the pharmacy, pick up the med, pay the amount due, but at the end of the year, CVS cannot give me a list of his meds for our records. HE has to sign off on it. </p>
<p>Tell your son to look it up and read the award to you , or copy it and send it to you.</p>
<p>My son, a high schooler, attends a program for high school students at the local flagship. The school refuses to discuss his grades with us, his parents, citing privacy laws. They say they treat my son as if he was university student to whom those laws apply. Just as you do, I have no idea what laws they are referring to.</p>
<p>Of course I will do that, I have a great relationship with the kid, and as I said, this is just a straight out rant. </p>
<p>However this system is just insane. I can understand CVS’s point - you are paying his bills, but as an 18 year old he might have something in his medical record he doesn’t want you to know and you aren’t automatically entitled to that information. I can understand that we don’t get to see his grades for the exact same reason.</p>
<p>However, we - NOT HIM - are directly responsible for paying his college bills. His financial aid award is based on OUR income and assets. And yet these “privacy” laws don’t protect our information in any way shape or form, and are counterproductive in regards to us doing what the school wants us to do - pay the bill. This isn’t protecting a single one of his rights. This is just denying us ours.</p>
<p>It’s the way the school has their systems set up to safeguard accidental release of private info. In Lerkin’s case, the student isn’t even of age, but the school has set up the system a certain way and it is easier to make an internal rule of consistency. </p>
<p>It was many years ago that these changes occurred because the schools very badly lost a major lawsuit of privacy issues. Now they are ultra careful. I agree it’s a pain.</p>
<p>Are you in fact “directly responsible for paying his college bills”? My D’s bills are addressed to her, and in the end it’s up to her to make sure they are paid, whether by arranging for us to write a check from our bank account, or by delving into a satchel of cash she found on the street. Or she can look at the bill and decide she doesn’t want to burden us any more and drop out. As I see it, while the calculation of her obligation to the school is based on her family’s finances, it’s still her obligation. The school’s relationship is solely with the student, not the parents or grandparents or whoever else is taking on the task of payment. The school doesn’t know, and has no business knowing, who in fact is financing someone’s education. Looking at it that way, it makes sense that the FA info goes to the student. And I don’t see why it’s so complicated to simply ask your son to read the terms of the FA package to you over the phone, or type them into an email. He doesn’t have to give you his password, just the relevant info.</p>
<p>Are you in fact “directly responsible for paying his college bills”?</p>
<p>Well, the bills actually come to both of us. I have a direct parent log in to the Bursar’s office.</p>
<p>From our son’s school’s financial aid FAQ’s</p>
<p>*My parents do not want to pay for college. Can I apply for financial aid as an independent student?</p>
<p>XX College does not offer financial assistance to students who declare themselves independent of their parents, nor are we able to offer assistance if parents decide that they no longer wish to support a student at XX College.*</p>
<p>I think it’s pretty clear who’s responsible for the bills. And no, it’s not complicated to have my son get the information to me. It’s just inane.</p>
If he can see it, he can PRINT SCREEN, paste it into a doc and send it to you.</p>
<p>And technically, you aren’t responsible to pay the bills. It’s just that the school expects you to help pay them. They can’t make you, and neither can he.</p>
<p>What’s nuts here is that parents or any other approved-by-the-student party can sign on to see the bursar’s bills, but not to see the FA award. Why say that someone other than the student can see one but not the other?</p>
<p>Yup, I know that. This is a rant. Technically all sorts of things are possible. Realistically, we pay the bills. The financial aid award affects us more than it does him. He doesn’t even need to know the information. </p>
<p>The point of ranting it to let off steam when frustrated. There is a frustrating lack of logic in privacy laws that expose all of a parent’s financial information to a child who has no need to know it, and yet forces the parent to rely on the child’s availability to retrieve the result of the exposure.</p>
<p>You can all gently explain the laws and the systems and who is ultimately responsible till the cows get home. The bottom line is that I am paying what the school decides I will pay, and that amount is based on my very detailed information which I sent to the school at their request, and it annoys me to no end that information I need access to is denied to me based on “privacy laws” when, really, there is no privacy at all for the parent in this process.</p>
<p>If you want another rant I can go off on the fact that during the application process I (and you, I am sure) sent complete tax returns and other highly confidential information blindly off to about a dozen schools as part of the application process, trusting that they would be handled properly and shredded as they should when my child didn’t attend. We are taught to keep our social security numbers carefully guarded and yet here we are sending this information off to be processed by a bunch of students on work study with curious eyes. I know who opens the envelopes and organizes the file folders, I worked in the financial aid office when I was a college student.</p>
<p>And don’t reply “well, that’s what you have to do to get financial aid, you don’t have to apply if you don’t want to expose your finances”. Of course, and I could decide to move to a cave somewhere and live off the land. I like most of you live in our society and follow its rules and try to get the best for my kids within the system and without yet having won the lottery. Guess I am still ranting here . . .</p>
<p>^ You pay the bills, which is wonderful, but it’s not required. Ultimately, it’s his bill, not yours, which is why he gets it and not you. </p>
<p>Like ST said though, it’s strange that you can see the bill but not the FA package. Everywhere I know of where you can see the bill, you can see the award package. </p>
<p>I won’t comment on the other stuff because I truly have no idea why parents keep finances hidden. Not judging, just never understood it.</p>
<p>At my kids’ schools, the kids set up parent accounts so all the bills are copied to us. Aren’t we lucky? So every time they get a bill or have an overdue book, we get a copy. Don’t know about the FA.</p>
<p>I am in the camp of the kids do not know what we have. I am sure that if they did, there would be a lot more questioning about why we are not spending it. On them. ;)</p>
<p>We were given a chance to get our own accounts/passwords, to view bills, various messages. I have both kids’ account names and pwords, also for that purpose. We also get paper copies of he FA awards, mailed to us. The kids do not see our finaid applications. We do show them the awards. (If you look at the finaid forms, btw, they address the student- “you” is the kid, assuming the kid is filing the data.)</p>
<p>I agree Ferpa is crazy. These are still kids, dependents. But, sometimes, the core of the privacy issue is when the kid, himself, thinks it’s some big deal, some vital area of his life to protect. Why can’t the kid just give his parents the account logon details?</p>
<p>As for doctors, same. My kids signed the waivers (home and at school) so we could discuss med issues.</p>
<p>I tend to agree with Carmen. It’s absolutely screwy and not explainable. I believe the “grown up” way for the college business to handle it is to create separate user names and passwords for the financial end of it which SHOULD include the financial aid “offer” for the year. My second son’s college does not do this, but he just game me his user name and password and it accesses the accounting and final grades/SAP process. His school separates out the e-mail, the day to day grade reports, assignments, etc. info. and he has a separate user name and password that i do not know and don’t need to know. I still find it very odd indeed that we would pass a law that “protects” kids but “requires” parents to give their financial info and ultimately pay, but not give them access to the information related to that action. Everyone can justify it this way or that way but if you step back it is a screwy system. In my opinion HIPPA and FERPA could have been structured to 'give kids, spouses, family members etc the right to protect their privacy through opt out rather than giving everyone the individual right not to have their info given and having to opt out of the privacy. Screwy indeed and typical of the dumb things our elected officials do. The cost of manages HIPPA and FERPA is not small but I believe it’s exponentially higher than it needed to be.</p>
<p>You know it’s funny - I allow my kids to have a ton of privacy. I don’t know their passwords, have never asked for access to their accounts, haven’t signed the waivers.</p>
<p>Don’t be so sure your kids don’t have access to the financial aid applications - I have access to my son’s account now and it has links to the CSS-Profile and FAFSA, he knows his passwords and pin, he can just log in and look.</p>
<p>We got paper FA awards prior to this year - this is a new system. There are no paper awards being mailed out from my son’s school, only online access. There is absolutely no sense to a system that offers me online access to my bill but not to the offsetting aid, but so be it - rant officially over!</p>
<p>*Wouldn’t any aid he gets be reflected in the bill?
*
Nope, that’s the stupid thing - the bill simply shows the total owed per semester, and then it will show the aid subtracted after the payments are made. Also, we split our share of the bill into 10 payments - but within the school’s system if you want to make payments that way the first payment is due June 1st. We “missed” the June payment, but if we know what we owe before the end of June we will make a double payment July 1st, otherwise we will make a triple payment August 1st. We’d prefer to make a double payment July 1st but won’t be able to do that rationally until we know what our share is.</p>
<p>Expecting the school to know whose parents pay, whose don’t, to which families bills should be mailed, etc. just can’t happen. They set one policy, based on FERPA, and go with it. Yes, it’s frustrating. D1s fin aid award went to her. She had to bring it to me and show me. The bill comes to my house, but I think it is addressed to d. I never see a grade report.</p>
<p>I can’t see insurance claims on the insurance website, but every doctor’s bill comes to dh as the insured. </p>