LPC FINANCIAL AID OFFICE

1. LPC FINANCIAL AID OFFICE

2. WHO ARE OUR STAFF? Andi Schreibman, Financial Aid Officer (6/1987) Ann Jones, Financial Aid Specialist (12/1995) Erneso Nery, Financial Aid Specialist (8/2009) Daysi Valle, bilingual Financial Aid Specialist (8/2009)

3. What is our purpose? The purpose of Financial Aid is to ensure that each student has sufficient resources to enable them to attend college. We provide a variety of aid, including federal and state grants, fee waivers, scholarships, loans, and federal work-study.

4. What are our other charges? To provide funds to our students in as timely a manner as possible (ideally so that they can buy books in time for classes, pay for living expenses, and try to help avert financial crises!). Support classroom retention by doing the above Provide access to students who otherwise could not afford college Meet compliance from federal and state entities in our policies, practices, procedures, and in providing aid to every individual student. To ensure that taxpayer money is provided to the students for whom it was intended

5. Who is eligible for financial aid at a 2 year college? Citizens, eligible non-citizen (permanent resident, resident alien, refugee, asylee; work or student visa not eligible) If male, must be registered with Selective Service. Be enrolled and working toward a Dept of Edu. approved degree, certificate, or eligible transfer program in a declared major at Las Positas. (Program must be approved by chancellor’s office, not pending approval; certificates must be at least 17 units in length)

6. Who is eligible for financial aid at a 2 year college? Must have a H.S diploma, GED, have successfully passed 6 units of academic coursework at LPC, or passed an Ability to Benefit test which assesses reading and math skills Student must be maintaining satisfactory academic progress (we measure this as having completed 67% of units attempted each term with a 2.0 minimum gpa) Must have completed less than 90 attempted units unless approved by excessive units petition Student must not have earned a bachelor’s degree or they are not eligible for any type of grant. They may, however, qualify for a loan or federal workstudy, once evaluated for remaining coursework by a counselor if their excessive units petition is approved.

7. How does a student get financial aid? • Everything starts with the FAFSA (www.fafsa.ed.gov). It’s online and it’s what’s needed for all sources of federal and state financial aid. • Students are considered dependent if under age 24 and must complete the fafsa with the parent(s), regardless of whether they receive support or not. • Veterans, orphans, former foster youth, married students, students who provide more than 50% support for their own child ARE Independent and need not include parental information.

8. A little about our process Once students submit their fafsa we receive their results electronically in about 1 week. We determine who appears to be eligible for aid and mail them a letter to complete their file and refer them to the ZONE or CLASS WEB to determine what forms are needed.

9. More about the process Starting this year we mail only one letter. Subsequent reminders are by email only! Students download forms from our website and submit them in person, by fax, by mail, or email scanned copies. Our staff then begins the review process.

10. Official Cost of attendance at LPC for 9 month school year

11. So how much could a student receive at LPC? Registration fee waiver – valued at $728 Pell Grants – up to $5500 ($8323 if fulltime fall/spring & summer with new 2 Pells in One Year Program) SEOG Grants – up to $600 ACG Grant – up to $1300 FWS – up to $5000 Federal Direct Loan – up to $10,500/year Cal Grant – up to $1551/year Chafee Grant for foster youth – up to $5000/year Scholarships….no limit! Each financial aid program has its own specific requirements and criteria to qualify.

12. Does a student have to be fulltime for financial aid? NO! Some students qualify for pell grants for LESS than halftime enrollment! They just receive a lot less. Most other grants and all loans require at least halftime enrollment Students will not receive as much grant money if they are less than fulltime.

13. How long can a student receive financial aid? A new regulation started 7/1/09 requires that a student can receive a pell grant for the equivalent of 18 fulltime semesters while pursuing an undergraduate degree. Students are limited to 90 attempted units while at a 2 year college, unless an excessive units petition has been approved.

14. Board of Governor’s Fee Waiver Program If a student has as little as $1 of financial need they receive a registration fee waiver. This makes the fee waiver our largest program. Students must have unmet need to receive all grants and to work under the federal workstudy program.

15. Scholarships (F.Y.I.!) Current Outside Scholarship List Maintained on our webpage and updated frequently through the year LPC Scholarship Program Feb 1 – mid- March all forms are posted on our website Other scholarship resources listed on our website, including free searches

16. Federal Direct Loan Program Replaced our original Stafford Loan program which ended June 30, 2010. This is the only program now available. The federal government loans money directly to the students via the college. Payments deferred while in college at least halftime 6-month grace period after graduation 10 – 30 year repayment period Student needs to maintain enrollment in only 6 units to qualify. Annual limits (up to $10,500) Aggregate limits for undergraduates $57,000

17. Growth in Student Loans at LPC

18. Loan Issues Excessive borrowing Dropping after receiving funds Default rate calculation (currently 10.4 %) No staff to counsel students regarding excessive borrowing, needs vs. wants, etc. Formerly bank lenders did our counseling, and more recently we hired a professional expert to counsel students. Can no longer afford. Students with prior bachelors degrees and high debt coming back to community college for retraining and requesting to borrow more

19. Other loan issues As part of our default prevention plan, we request a work-in-progress report from instructors of all students with no prior academic record, or with a questionable record.. We deny loans to students with unsatisfactory reports, as well as students who we feel have too high a loan debt. While conducting Work In Progress reports creates a lot of extra work for us but we do weed out a lot of risky students so we think it’s worth it Cumulative loan debt has been increasing…not unusual to see over $25,000 today just from attending LPC!

20. A Typical Day Working in the Financial Aid Office Students who submit an online FAFSA application must follow up with the financial aid office to submit additional documents. A student’s financial aid file is NOT COMPLETE until they submit all required documents and/or resolve any issues with their application or paperwork with the financial aid office. Every day, all staff receive & return phone calls, respond to emails, and meet with students to provide information regarding financial aid information, information about awards and disbursement, resolve financial aid issues, and answer questions regarding a student’s status, debit card issues, etc. We have to argue with angry parents who don’t think FERPA applies to them! We have to maintain a professional level of customer service with often very difficult students and parents.

21. A Typical Day Working in the Financial Aid Office Seeing students is only half our job. The rest is behind the scenes. We are responsible for meticulously reviewing information such as household size, income and AGI reported on tax returns, assets, number in college, resolving any conflicting information, and accurately reporting the correct information back to the Department of Education. We process files, review and approve loans, and disburse grants, loans and scholarships to our students. We also have to resolve data matches with Homeland Security, Social Security, the National Student Loan Data System, and Selective Service before awarding aid. All staff process loan applications, award students federal and state aid, and disburse aid. We make professional judgement determinations for special circumstances petitions to make adjustments to income if family income/circumstances has changed

22. Growth in financial aid at LPC

23. FYI…Growth in total financial aid dollars to students at LPC

24. How have we adapted to decreased budget, increased workload? GOING GREEN! Cut down our mailing by 75% reducing postage and printing costs significantly by utilizing email to drive students to the Zone or Class Web for their account information. Also reduces amount of scanning we must do since we don’t print as much! Continuously work to improve our website. Posted all office forms for ease of access and less printing cost. Informing students UP FRONT that they must review their info on the Zone. No longer printing award letters, sending them to the Zone and CLASS WEB instead! Reduced drop-in hours to allow us time to work on files after being four weeks behind. This dramatically sped up processing time and we are currently CAUGHT UP! This actually makes students much happier, and less students feel the necessity to come in because they are paid faster!

25. How have we adapted to decreased budget, increased workload? This year, once we migrated to Direct Lending we chose to utilize only Online Direct loan counseling instead of hiring an expert to provide counseling services. This speeds up the loan process for students and reduces our workload, but has negative implications. We worry that students don’t really get the idea of needs vs. wants and the impact of taking on huge debt without one on one counseling, but we can’t afford to give them that kind of service. This may result in excessive borrowing on the part of many students and eventually default, affecting the college’s default rate down the line.

26. What are the bottlenecks –why do so many students get paid late? Students will always procrastinate. It’s a fact of life! They wait to apply; many show up first day of classes and haven’t even filed a fafsa! They don’t follow up to complete their files. They literally ignore our notifications. This was part of the drive to stop mailing letters! They ignore or are not aware of our priority filing deadline of July 15. Only students who complete files by July 15 are guaranteed payment the first week of classes! Sometimes students made poor progress the most recent semester and their aid won’t pay. (We may not have sent out notification letters yet.)

27. What are the bottlenecks –why do so many students get paid late? About 75% of students who are aid eligible are selected for ‘verification’ by the feds. This means we must collect & verify all pertinent income information before awarding aid. This causes further delays and we find the majority of these fafsas need to be corrected, requiring another week until possible payment. Students who need a counseling appointment for an excessive units petition or a transcript evaluation often have to wait several weeks for an opening, and then possibly several more weeks until we are able to review their petition. Petitions for poor progress or excessive units are taking us up to 6 weeks to get through because of the sheer numbers. Occasionally there is an office error. We always offer a book loan for our bookstore when it is our fault to help meet the student’s immediate needs.

28. Challenges Understaffing. From July 1, 2009- June 30, 2010, our staff saw 3533 unduplicated students on drop-in, according to SARS. Many of these students came in several times. Therefore, we served 1/3 of the population of enrolled students at the college. This year, by the end of the second week of classes our three specialists had seen 1203 unduplicated students on drop-in! Two of those days they saw more than 155 students in a 7 hour period! Talk about sheer exhaustion! No accounting staff to support the financial aid office in providing and reconciling over $6,000,000 in federal and state aid

29. Challenges The only thing constant in financial aid is CHANGE! EVERY year program rules and regulations change from both fed/state requiring annual training. Recent examples: -Last summer a new program called ‘2 Pells in One Year’ began, completely new way to calculate summer pells. - Also in summer the previous loan program where students borrowed from banks was terminated and we were required to switch to a completely different program, the Direct Loan Program Frequent banner upgrades require us to do serious testing several times/year. We had to do testing for the 2 pells and the direct loan programs before going live while simultaneously dealing with huge increases in students applying for aid!

30. Challenges Maintaining compliance with regulations while feeling pressure to serve students in a timely manner New sometimes convoluted programs put on us by the feds without thought as to how to carry them out and require manual procedures Archaic technology from the state with Cal Grant program requires everything entered on state system manually Maintaining calm while under severe pressure, especially the beginning of classes.

31. Other issues/constraints Fraud has been a significant issue this past year. Increased numbers of students who received financial aid funds never attended. The college must pay the feds back 100% of this money! Students who withdraw before the 60% point in a term who were paid a pell require very time-consuming accounting calculations and procedures to maintain compliance (‘R2TIV’. They also cost the college a lot of money! Increased from 88 students in 2008-09 ($3153 cost) to 231 students in 2009-10 ($14,037 cost). Takes 20-30 minutes/student to calculate and do required accounting for each student. Remember, we have no accounting support! Back Dated and late instructor withdrawals – many improvements with the college on notice about fraud this year. In the past, caused many students to receive taxpayer money they should not have received.

32. Other issues/constraints Loan default rate expected to increase due to excessive borrowing, poor economy, and new change in how it is calculated. Handling increasing numbers of petitions. Nearly doubled from 254 in 2008-09 to 494 in 2009-2010, very time consuming! Stressed out students. Things are tough enough, but when it comes to money they can be desperate, unreasonable, irrational and downright rude, in person, by phone and even by email!

33. The Bottom Line…. • We are an awesome team of four tireless, dedicated, and flexible staff, who are totally dedicated to our mission and will do whatever it takes to get funds to our students. We continue to provide excellent customer service to our students, get students paid far more quickly than most other colleges even with full staff, and we get the job done. • We face ever increasing challenges as numbers and demands increase while staffing level remains at our 2004-2005 level, but we are committed to being the little office than can!

34. Q & A Q & A Q & A Q & A Q & A Q & A Q & A Q & A Questions and Answers