Students receive delayed PLUS loans
Published Nov. 6, 2007
Some students are beginning to receive long-awaited funds from Federal Parent Loan for Undergraduate Students loans, which have been delayed since the beginning of the semester.
According to MU spokesman Christian Basi, Student Financial Aid reported that 488 Federal PLUS loans, totaling about $2.6 million, have successfully cleared the certification procedures mandated by the U.S. Department of Education and have been disbursed to students.
The sluggish pace of the disbursement of PLUS loans has been attributed to the complexities associated with the PLUS loan application process, as well as the recent implementation of the myZou program, Basi said in a previous Maneater report.
The program contained the necessary student information to process all other loans but lacked the information on students' parents required for processing PLUS loans.
Student Financial Aid is responsible for the collection of this missing data from students' parents.
Basi said 1,112 loans are awaiting certification from the federal government, and 1,600 more are being prepared by MU to be sent through the certification process.
Since delays in the release of PLUS loan funds began at the beginning of the semester, the university has awarded 926 short-term, no interest loans — amounting to about $1.34 million — to assist students who were affected by the delays.
MU junior Valerie Peterson, who said she is awaiting $7,000 in aid, described herself as "the poster child for everything gone wrong" with loan disbursement this semester.
"All my stuff is pending, and it's November," she said.
Peterson said she has had to borrow money from outside lenders, borrow money from her parents and pay "out of pocket" to cope with her bills to the university.
The Missouri Students Association passed a resolution Oct. 25 approving the creation of a survey that would assess the impact of the financial aid delays on students.
MSA Senate Speaker Jonathan Mays said the survey would draw from a representative sample of the MU student population.
The survey will be prepared by members of MSA and the Department of Student Life, and must be sponsored by a person who is certified by an institutional review board as eligible to submit a survey.
An institutional review board and five other campus entities would then review the survey after its submission.
Mays said the process could take anywhere from a few days to several months to complete, but MSA would see the process through to the end.
"We are going to follow this step by step until we get it done," he said.
Mays said a questionnaire on students' concerns about the Federal PLUS loans could be distributed in an upcoming issue of MSA Monthly as an alternative to the survey.