Between MSU’s Office of Financial Aid and the Office of the Registrar, a steady flow of student queries and problems are dealt with on a daily basis, but some students have different opinions on how helpful these departments are.
Dessa Kenney, a first-year graduate student in special education, said she did not have a good experience while trying to contact the offices.
Kenney takes online courses for her master’s program while living in Arizona.
She called the registrar’s office at the beginning of September because her financial aid wasn’t being dispersed and she was going to be disenrolled by midnight.
“Each time I called I was on hold for about 15 minutes before anyone picked up the phone,” she said.
Val Meyers, the financial aid office’s associate director, said the offices try to cater to students and parents in ways that work best for them.
“We do a lot of e-mailing to students to their e-mail address and we look at if they haven’t completed their loan process or if they are not registered when it is late in the term,” she said.
“We also try and e-mail two or three times every spring to remind them to apply for aid for the next year.”
Meyers said the office’s busiest time is the month before classes start every semester, and at that time a person can expect to be on hold for about 30 minutes, but during other times it is usually less than five minutes.
Kenney said she became more frustrated when she explained the situation and the registrar’s office would send her to the financial aid office and vice versa.
“Basically they had me bouncing back and forth between the two until I finally got to a point that I was in tears,” Kenney said. “I wasn’t getting answers.”
The problem was solved after 45 minutes when the financial aid office talked to the registrar’s office.
All the information needed is on a Web site, Meyers said. But there are a lot of requirements for financial aid — federal, state and institutional rules, which present a lot of information to both students and parents.
“We try to make it as clear as we can, but because there is so much it’s very possible a person could miss something at one point or another,” Meyers said.
“We know each other. We work together and if we have problems, we try to get together and deal with them.”
Emily Stevens, a kinesiology freshman, left the Office of the Registrar with a sigh of relief after asking a question about her advanced placement exam scores from high school.
“I just walked in and they tried to handle the situation,” Stevens said.
“I found out about it late, so considering it was a stupid move on my part they were really nice to me about it.”
The financial aid office recently updated and redesigned its Web site in hopes of making it more user friendly, and there’s now a link for feedback from students and parents.
The financial aid office shares an 800 number with admissions and the registrar — the MSU Helpline, which is staffed from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
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There will always be some problems like this situation, where for the students involved it can be very frustrating, Meyers said.
But on a general basis it is rare to have those kinds of problems, she said.
“Usually, we know what the problem is so we are able to say, ‘Yes, this is something we can help you with’ or, ‘No, this is not something we can help you with,’” Meyers said. “Very rarely it is that you don’t know where the problem lies.”
