My school has always divided up all financial aid into halves and left it up to the student to put back enough money on their own, to cover summer school if they needed to go to summer school. This year, without notifying any of us, they decided to split our financial aid into three disbursements and not tell anyone; I am only just now learning of it. I had carefully planned my budget around getting half now and half in the spring and now my budget is completely blown out of the water. Since I am taking extra classes in the spring and not taking any summer school classes, it makes no sense to break it down into three disbursements. Bad enough that they refuse to release our money until October (school starts in August), but this really puts me in a bad position. When I got my car loan, I didn’t have to wait two months for it and they gave it to me in the manner that I needed it. Same with any other loan I’ve had. Do I have any say so in how they disburse my loan? I mean…it is my money after all; when I signed that promissory note, it became my responsibility.
I’m confused…did you go to summer school? She says she took NO summer classes.
I seriously doubt the change in disbursement was done with NO notice to students.
Have you discussed this with your financial aid or bursars office?
Did your school just change to trimesters? If that is the case, the school has to split the loan into 3 equal disbursements.
Your school can disburse any way it wants - you don’t get to decide how you want it to be disbursed. It sounds odd, though, if the school is a semester school (although again, they can have their own policies, as long as they apply them to everyone) - are you willing to share the name of the school so I can look at their website? Some semester schools will do a full-year loan split, but that is often based on an enrollment plan that includes summer enrollment. It is possible you might be able to request a 2-semester split.
Kelsmom, We haven’t changed to trimesters. My program actually required I take four summer school classes this past summer, and everyone’s disbursement was released only in fall and spring last year. Those who didn’t set back enough for those summer classes were essentially told “too bad so sad, we split our disbursement into two payments and you should have saved some of your disbursement for summer classes.” I was able to go to summer school, but a lot of those kids weren’t because they didn’t know they were supposed to have saved back some of that money; I felt sorry for them.
This was a very big deal in my program because we have a small program to begin with and we lost a sizeable chunk of our students due to that (our graduating class will be around 10 students, down from 25 before the summer school incident). So fast forward to this year, when there are no required summer school classes for second year students and imagine my surprise when I learn that they have broken down my payments into three this time. That would have been much more helpful to a lot of people last year and I thought maybe they did that because of the big issue last year, but I have talked to other students in the program and some of them still got two payments and some got three. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. No notice for anyone. Very weird.
All that said…I DID go to the financial aid office and they were able to switch me back to the two payment disbursement, thank goodness. It was as simple as filling out a short form requesting it, which surprised the heck out of me. I told the people who got the three disbursements that Financial Aid would switch them back to two if they filled out that form, so at least they had that recompense if they needed it.