Several students report delays in receiving IU aid

Several students seeking scholarships, fellowships and grants for summer activities like research and internships abroad have had to wait for the money they were told would be given to them.\nThe delay was caused mainly by the set-up of the Student Information System, which, along with the Financial Information System, keeps records of student enrollment and allows officials to deposit aid into students' accounts, said Rozzie Gerstman, campus budget consultant and BL chart manager. The problem was the SIS stipulation that students are only enrolled if they are taking a certain number of credit hours, which causes many students to not show up in that particular system during the summer because students typically don't take as many classes, Gerstman said. Thus, summer aid for some students had to be distributed through the FIS system and staff had to double-check the names in the FIS system to ensure that they were in fact not enrolled or in the SIS system.\n"There are two ways to pay a person -- through the student system, SIS, and the financial system, FIS. ... When people are enrolled and we need to pay them, it should always go through SIS," she said. "If they're not (enrolled for the summer), they need to go through FIS. If students are using the FIS system, we're looking to make sure they're not enrolled. That's what has taken so long. It's all based on enrollment."\nAmong the various types of delayed summer aid, research-related aid seemed to represent the majority, Gerstman said. She said that, overall, fewer than 30 or 40 students were impacted by the delay and as of a couple of weeks ago, all summer funding had been paid out with the exception of a few "brand new" cases. She also said that not much money was involved, and that she had personally not received complaints from students, though she said individual departments were the offices in direct contact with students seeking their summer aid.\nBut some students were angry that their funding was not given to them at the time it was promised. Sam Scarpino, a senior who traveled to Kenya for an internship this summer, was outraged at the delay.\n"The University did not uphold its end of the financial bargain with students and used the federal government as a scape-goat," he wrote in an e-mail. "First, after several inquiries where I was told blatantly incorrect information, I was informed my funds would not be credited for 10 business days. This was after the bursar took my spring scholarship money to pay my summer bills. Under no other financial situation would an institution like Indiana University not be held responsible for this shortcoming. It was a serious misuse of trust on the part of the University and an even more serious difficulty for many students who rely on these funds to sustain themselves."\nAnother student who had received summer aid was annoyed at the delay and doubted that it only affected 30 or 40 students. The student said it would even be a "negative reflection" on how much summer funding IU offered students if it affected so few.\nGraduate student Paul Rohwer, a moderator for the Graduate and Professional Student Organization, was upset by the computer system issues and by the discrepancy in how many credit hours graduate students needed to take in order to receive their summer funding.\n"There was a back-and-forth at the end of the spring and a meeting was called in May to resolve the full-time status of student academic appointees. It used to be six hours but during the spring semester it was changed to eight," he said. "They had to go around the PeopleSoft system to get things paid. Even now with some of the fellowships, the students are being called 'independent contractors' in order to get money paid to them if they're not enrolled in summer classes. To me, when they designed the SIS system, a student should be a student until they graduate. ... Students are always entities until they graduate. The system itself is jargon."\nIn regards to the graduate student funding issues, Mitchell Byler, assistant dean for graduate education in the College of Arts and Sciences, said that the confusion about necessary credit hours was resolved quickly. He knew of four students who had to wait an extra two weeks but still received their funding by the end of May, he said.\n"Different offices were interpreting the enrollment requirement differently," he said. "In order to receive aid, Gerstman's office was using a policy on the registrar's Web site that says there are eight credit hours required. The problem I had was that these were advanced students who were only enrolled in six. Gerstman's office did bring all the relevant offices together and worked it out fairly quickly."\nGerstman said the main goal of the May 16 meeting was to address problems and make sure the proper guidelines were being followed. \n"The big concern is that we track how we pay students," she said. "We need to comply with federal financial aid regulations and IRS guidelines. ... We had to come up with a way to meet these"