When Jessica Boyle '12J walks into a classroom, a party or the dining hall to grab breakfast, she knows that she is different. The sophomore-next year's East Quad dorm president, and member of the Student Programming Board and class council-isn't a different color from most students.
I had never really thought about financial aid at Colby. I occasionally talk with my friends about it, increasingly more so as we approach the graduation day of reckoning, but our conversations only briefly touch upon being broke with loans to repay once we leave Colby.
This May, as over 500 seniors receive their diplomas and begin their life after Colby, roughly 40 percent of them will have debt. Leaving the Hill with finances in the negative and Colby still not fully paid for seems like an unsettling situation, but for 200 graduating seniors, student loans have made it a reality.
Recently, 222 students participated in an online survey regarding facts and perspectives on financial aid at Colby. Of those surveyed, 43 percent identified themselves as receiving aid from Colby, and 57 percent said they did not. This surveyor was surprised to find many similarities among the answers of both categories of students; however, certain trends and patterns did arise.
When I was applying to colleges, way back in Bush's first term in office, one of the most important criteria to me was a need-blind admissions policy. For those new to the term, a need-blind policy is when the admissions office does not consider financial aid eligibility to be a factor in determining one's qualifications for enrollment.
If you don't understand loans, grants, or your financial aid package, if you don't know what it means to be a borrower or what your rights and responsibilities are as a student on financial aid, of you don't know how to send a bill home or what it means to have bad credit, where do you go? The Financial Services Office.