PAGE
6
FEATURE Students struggle with finances by EMILY LIN-JONES Feature Editor
F
or students from lower-income backgrounds, financial aid is often a critical part of their decision to attend Whitman—but navigating the ups and downs of financial aid from semester to semester can pose a significant challenge, even with support from the Office of Financial Aid itself. “It’s definitely a little blow to the self esteem ... a sense of anxiety comes, a lot of worry,” said junior first-generation student Heather Lovelace, who identifies as working class, on receiving her aid package each semester. Lovelace recalls being intimidated and overwhelmed by the process of applying for financial aid even before she made the decision to attend Whitman. “I think one thing I was really perturbed with about the college application process is that it seems like everyone just expects you to know these things, and when you have questions, no one is forthcoming with information,” she said. Though Lovelace has relied on scholarships, loans and summer income to be able to attend Whitman, she said the financial aid she has received hasn’t always reflected her family’s need. “My parents are kind of in that middle class area where they make too much for a lot of [need-based aid], but they don’t make enough where they can pay for the school,” she said. There are times in the past, she recalls, when she wasn’t sure if she would be able to continue to pay for Whitman. “One thing I remember distinctly was that I emailed the financial aid office and someone replied, and they said, ‘You have to think about your future,’ and stuff like that, just really not what I needed or wanted to hear,” she said. She admitted that many of her past dealings with Whitman’s Office of Financial Aid have left her stressed and dissatisfied. “I haven’t been very impressed with our Whitman financial aid office, but I don’t know if it’s them or just the system ... I understand that college is not cheap, but it’s hard when you get a financial aid package that you don’t think reflects what your family can afford.” Lovelace’s struggle to continue to finance her four years at Whitman isn’t unique. Other students, such as first-generation and working class junior Leslie Rodriguez and first-generation and working class senior Bridget Tescher, report wrestling with confusing federal guidelines, changing home situations and inconsistencies in their yearly financial aid packages. Rodriguez said she stressed over finances a lot during her first semester at Whitman, when it seemed like her work study and scholarship package wouldn’t be enough to cover tuition. Her mother sold homemade tamales to friends and coworkers to help make up the difference. “I think [there is] the whole question of ‘Is it ethical to bring students from low socioeconomic [backgrounds] to Whitman?’ ... Whitman accepts a certain amount of [these] students ... Why are they accepting students only
for them to later say they might not be able to meet some of their needs?” she asked. “Is it ethical for them to accept these students and put them through four years [of college] and for them to financially struggle during the process?” Tescher, like Rodriguez, was the first in her immediate family to attend college. She is largely financially independent from her parents, and like other students in similar situations, is often frustrated that the college won’t always acknowledge this. “Ironically, the biggest pet peeve I have is that Whitman always sends my financial statement to my parents ... they always mail it to my dad, and every time it beyond frustrates me,” said Tescher. The Office of Financial Aid awarded need-based aid to 45 percent of the student body last year. The college offers some forms of aid specifically aimed at first-generation students, including the Lomen-Douglas scholarship, which is awarded to students who “contribute to increasing socioeconomic and multicultural diversity awareness at Whitman.” Many past recipients of this scholarship have identified themselves as firstgeneration and working class students. “When we admit a student who is first generation and diverse, we believe that it is important that we be committed to their financial aid and helping them,” said Director of Financial Aid Services Marilyn Ponti. According to Ponti, the college will usually try to award 80 to 85 percent of a first-generation student’s need in the form of scholarship money. But even students who receive scholarships usually have an expected family contribution as well, anywhere from $1000 to $2000 per semester or more. “There is an expected family contribution ... and the parents need to be responsible for that. If they aren’t, we can’t ignore that,” said Ponti. Though the Office of Financial Aid does try to meet each student’s need to the best of their ability, there are limits to what they can do, she said. “In financial aid, we try to work with every single student and every single family, but we can’t just allow every family to say ‘We’re not going to pay our contribution...’ If that were the case, we wouldn’t be able to help as many students as we do,” she said. “We have many conversations this time of year, that maybe Whitman is not the right fit [for incoming students] if you’re not able to make it work financially. Those are conversations we have to have.” The disconnect between the reality of Tescher’s situation and the college’s perception of it came to a fore when her dad remarried last year. She lost her Pell Grant as a result, and Whitman did not adjust her financial aid package to compensate for the loss, even though her stepmother
MAY
1
2014
“I understand that college is not cheap, but it’s hard when you get a financial aid package that you don’t think reflects what your family can afford” Heather Lovelace ‘15
would not be contributing to her tuition. Tescher blames the disconnect in part on the college basing their initial picture of students’ financial situations almost entirely on the FAFSA and other federal documents. “Especially because my parents don’t contribute anything to my financial [situation]. They don’t pay for anything, [and] they can’t pay for anything. And so it was like, there was already zero dollars coming in to me from my parents ... it went from unrealistic to completely unfeasible. And that put me in the predicament of having to walk away from my degree my senior year,” she said. Since the Office of Admission switched their process from needblind to need-sensitive four years ago, the amount of need-based aid awarded each year has remained approximately the same, while the amount of students receiving only merit-based aid has almost doubled. Meanwhile, the average amount of loans taken out by Whitman students has risen over the past five years, but the college has been increasing its expenditure on financial aid as well. “We don’t encourage students to take significant debt. That’s not what we do,” said Ponti, pointing out that the average debt of a graduating Whitman senior is significantly lower than the national average. To keep debt levels low, Ponti periodically checks up on students who she sees are taking on significant amounts of debt to see if their need can be reevaluated. She acknowledged that it
can be difficult for students to speak up about their financial situation. “Sometimes students are a little quieter, a little afraid to reach out ... if I reach out to them, that’s easier,” she said. Some students have found financial aid workshops and mentorship from the FGWC club and other on-campus organizations that has helped them learn how to navigate the difficult financial aid process. “Deciphering [financial aid] was really hard at the beginning, but I feel like I’ve gotten better at it because FGWC has had financial workshops that really helped me,” said Rodriguez. Still, students who receive significant amounts of aid agree there could be more resources on campus for students who have to balance the stress of school and work with applying for loans and scholarships, especially when their parents are not able to help. “I think that it would be amazing if we had something like financial counseling, or maybe someone within the Counseling Center [who] specializes in advice for financial aid and paying for school,” said Lovelace. After approaching the Office of Financial Aid several times in person to plead her case, Tescher was granted enough additional scholarship money to complete her degree. Though she found the college supportive and willing to help once she got through to them, she knows it wouldn’t have happened without her taking the initiative. “I think that they’ve been really good. And they did come through, that was the amazing thing,” she said. “[But] I think that if I hadn’t asked for it, obviously they wouldn’t have offered it.”
First-generation students experience isolation, culture shock from FGWC, page 1
Mireles, who now dedicates his life to the academic world, says that he has struggled with maintaining a connection to his roots. “It took me a while to figure that out. That in gaining the cultural capital of these elite institutions, I didn’t necessarily have to leave behind the rich and beautiful culture that I knew growing up,” said Mireles. “There was a long period of doubting, [thinking], ‘Well, am I Mexican enough? Am I working class enough?’” Pietrantoni, who went on to receive an MFA and Fulbright fellowship, says it’s increasingly difficult for her to connect with her family at home. Her first winter break back home as an undergraduate highlighted the fact that not only could she not identify socioeconomically with her classmates, but her family at home as well. “I felt like an alien. I was studying hearing my family speak, and I felt like an observer. The way they talked was so different, just with slang or mispronunciation of words. When I got to college I realized I was saying some things wrong, and I still do accidentally,” she said. “So I think there was this harsh realization that my education felt like it was distancing myself from them ... I don’t think my peers really had to experience that.” Cultural Capital Pietrantoni, who attended Vanderbilt University as an undergraduate, says there was an additional element of being working class that made her self conscious about her interactions with other college community members. “Students [at Vanderbilt] had social graces, such as ways in small talking and being able to really navigate social situations that I really didn’t have yet. I just didn’t have that experience of working with adults and professors that these other students did,” she said.
Mireles says his Swarthmore classmates had a number of social and cultural assets, which he refers to as ‘cultural capital,’ that gave them an advantage in the liberal arts environment. “I started reading ‘The New Yorker’ even though I didn’t always understand what they were referring to, and I think it was a very conscious process of accessing and learning cultural capital that others already had, given their background, and that I did not possess given my own background,” he said. Differences in cultural capital can be discouraging for firstgeneration college students, especially when it comes to academics. “[Non-first-generation college students’] parents probably read to them, put them in these classes, extracurricular activities ... they have already been exposed to opportunities that I haven’t been able to have. I constantly have to work 10 times harder than them, and it’s not even good enough. I’m never going to be at their level,” said Rodriguez. Rodriguez, a politics major, believes many first-generation college students haven’t gained the cultural capital to be academically confident at Whitman and often struggle in discussion-based classes. In these classes, a large percentage of grades is determined by students’ willingness to speak, which can be difficult when students are required to use cultural references, past experiences and knowledge they may not have. “I’ve always been intimidated by my peers just because they speak so eloquently and have amazing thoughts. It’s just like, ‘I couldn’t have come up with this’ ... That’s something I’ve always been upset about, because they’re way ahead of me,” she said. Unlike students with parents who went to college, first-generation students are often learning material well beyond their parents’ education level. During his first year
at Whitman, senior first-generation college student Cam Young was surprised to notice some of his friends had their parents edit their essays before turning them into professors. Ultimately, while he doesn’t think his grades have suffered because of it, he does feel he had to work harder academically to keep up with other Whitman students. “I couldn’t imagine how nice it would have been to have my parents read my papers and to have that kind of resource,” he said. “So I feel a lot of the time I was trying to make up for the knowledge and resources that I hadn’t had before, while simultaneously trying to learn what was currently being taught.” For Valdez, the transition to college academics was so difficult that he had to change majors. He also felt uncomfortable going to his professors’ office hours because he didn’t want them to feel that he was less intelligent than his classmates. “In high school, I did really well academically, and I didn’t think it was that hard. But then I came to Whitman, and it felt like a slap in the face. It was like, ‘What am I thinking?’ I couldn’t even understand what I was doing wrong,” he said. First-generation students who work often struggle to balance long work hours with Whitman academics. Tescher says she feels some Whitman faculty assume that all students can focus exclusively on academics, whereas she has always needed to divide her time and mental resources between school and work. Tescher says she has had professors show frustration that she didn’t attend their office hours because of work, yet didn’t allow appointments outside of office hours. “I think sometimes they give an unreasonable amount of classwork load because they assume that students don’t work more than five hours a week, if they work at all. It’s been difficult being assigned an unreasonable amount of work, to get it done and then go to class and then
go to work to be able to earn money to be able to go to class. It’s this horrible cycle of sacrificing my classwork or sacrificing my work, and then either way, I lose out,” she said. System of Support Not all students feel comfortable publicly identifying as first generation, which can make creating a systematic way for faculty to reach out to them difficult. Pietrantoni relates to not feeling comfortable sharing her background with professors and peers. “The best thing I can do as a faculty member is to support all of my students, even if they’re not first generation and working class, to create an environment where they’ll know that I’m always there to listen to whatever concern they might have,” she said. Mireles says he draws upon his experience as a first-generation college student in his grading style, and tries to keep in mind that not all his students come from elite academic backgrounds. “I put a lot of emphasis in classes on [students’] effort and [their] willingness to learn and engage [with] the material. I’m very conscious about this stuff because I felt the same way when I was in college. There would be these kids who did very little work and got a great return because they were well-prepared ... and then I and other friends would just work our butts off and get a B on the assignment, and that kid who wrote it two hours before it was due got the A,” he said. Currently, there are 47 faculty and staff members at Whitman who identify as first generation and have placed their names on a list that is available around campus for students who need mentorship. Young says that Peterson Endowed Chair of Social Studies Keith Farrington, a former firstgeneration college student himself, has provided him valuable guidance as an academic adviser.
“He’s really taught and guided me on my writing style and presentation style—his investment in me has been huge,” he said. In addition, the First Generation and Working Class Club, which was founded in 2002, has worked to make Whitman a welcoming community for first-generation college students. The club has grown in recent years and has begun a mentorship program this academic year, pairing incoming first-years with students who agreed to participate as mentors. “If I had someone early on who could have been able to show me some structure, some study tips, that would have refaced my college education,” said Young, who now mentors a first-year first-generation student himself. “Everyone deserves a group to be a part of and people to feel comfortable talking to,” said Charlip. Although Rodriguez says she has worked hard to be engaged in her classes and has sought extra guidance from fellow peers and professors, she doesn’t want being a first-generation student to define her and her Whitman experience. “I’ve come a long way since my freshman year ... But I’m still struggling [with it], and I’ll probably struggle later in life ... Yes, I am a first generation student. Yes, I haven’t been exposed to all these opportunities, but that shouldn’t limit my capabilities,” said Rodriguez. “I know I have a lot of potential. That’s why I’m here, but it’s still going to be a struggle and I’m still learning to improve and not be afraid or intimidated by my peers.” *Name has been changed.
*
Read more about FGWC students’ stories online
www.whitmanpioneer. com/category/feature