OneStop recalls aid

To comply with federal regulations, University of Cincinnati’s financial aid department issued refund checks to 1,174 students during the first week of November, then asked students to return the money.

Federal regulations under Title IV require universities to send refund checks to students who are in excess of their aid amount each term. Universities are not allowed to use the excess amount to pay for future terms, which is exactly what UC did.

The department hired a compliance officer to run an assessment audit on the university’s financial aid practices.

“He identified the logic as not being 100 percent compliant with federal regulations,” said Ken Wolterman, bursar of the cashiers, collections and student accounts office. “Once we figured out there was this error last year and this year, we looked back at everybody’s accounts retroactively until last fall.”

Approximately 44,000 student accounts were assessed, including students enrolled in the most recent summer quarter. Of the 1,174 students with refund checks, 970 were asked to return the amount to the university. The money is and will continue to be the students’ money, but it was incorrectly applied.

Students who enroll late or apply for financial aid after the deadline are included in this group of people.

“We identified those students before the refund checks were mailed or before the direct deposits hit,” said Cindy Hedrick, director of the student accounts office. “We let them know they were going to get the direct deposit or refund and this is what they needed to do.”

The notification e-mail sent to the affected students stated that the “refund was not an error” and that “Federal regulations [do] not permit UC to require or force you to use these funds to pay the resulting balance.”

A small percentage of the students contacted OneStop or administration officials for further explanation of the e-mail.

“I’ll take a copy of each one of their quarters and paste it into an e-mail so they can see where the balance came from, student by student,” Hedrick said.

Wolterman agrees with the general student response to the event.
“It’s the stupidest thing in the world. It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “You’re going to give me $1,000 and I have to give it back.”

The normal process for refund checks follows a timeline. Ten days prior to the beginning of a term, the first refund check is sent to students in the maximum amount of $1,500. By the 14th day of the term, all excess aid money, if any, must be refunded to the student.

The refund checks issued during the first week of November reflect in the fall 2009 quarter balance. If a student does not pay the required amount, ultimately creating a “zero balance,” a service block is applied. The block will forbid students from enrolling in winter quarter.

“There’s bound to be things that creep up that you didn’t test for, you didn’t plan for,” Wolterman said. “You just fix them and deal with them the best you can.”