When Penn State students are not partying, they are busy being dissatisfied with their financial aid, according to the recent Princeton Review's 2010 edition of The Best 371 Colleges.
Penn State University Park ranked No. 2 in the publication's list of students dissatisfied with financial aid. The book's lists are generated from about 325 student surveys per school.
"I haven't been to any other college, but I agree. This sucks," Sika Abbey (freshman-international relations) said of her experience with financial aid. "Ugh, it was horrible."
Abbey was waiting with many fellow students in the Office of Student Aid in the Shields Building Tuesday.
"It's hard to get them any other way," Sheneik Meade (senior-crime, law and justice) said, waiting for her consultation. She noted financial aid assistants are unreachable by phone and didn't respond to her through e-mail.
"Overall, personally, I think I had a good financial aid experience, but I do think I got lucky," Meade said.
Anna Griswold, executive director for student aid, sympathized with students' dissatisfaction.
"We wish that weren't the case, but that's reality," Griswold said.
Griswold noted that the university is working very hard to increase financial aid, but that the current economic situation is not helping.
"No school has gone through the last nine or ten months of time without feeling the pinch of the recession," said Rob Franek, the book's author.
Griswold said applications for financial aid are up from about 63,000 last year to more than 67,000 this year. However, she believes while applications for student aid are up, enrollment numbers will not be affected.
Sixty-seven percent of the survey's respondents said that financial aid would affect the schools to which they were going to apply.
"I think families think of it as an investment," Griswold said of the daunting price of tuition.
Franek believes that before students decide to make that investment, they should consider the facts.
"We've found that lots of students make some pretty big mistakes about the financial aid process at the beginning of the process," Franek said. "I want to make sure that I provide good, clear savvy info to a college bound public."
Franek said he believes that both parents and students stand to benefit from his information.
"What we found is that parents and students were united in one fear," Franek said. "That fear was that a student, them, would get into their first-choice school and not be able to pay for it."
Griswold said that while she acknowledges the task of paying for school as a legitimate obstacle, she questions the validity of the report.
Franek was not surprised.
"When schools are on less than coveted lists, schools do tend to discredit the validity of the survey," Franek said. He added that institutions that scored favorably often flaunt the ranking.
Another portion of the book gives a school a more quantitative rating of its financial aid. This ranking is based on three factors: what percentage of aid given is need-based, what percentage of that need is met, and what percentage of the need is met 100 percent.
The scores range from 60 to 99. Penn State, University Park received a score of 63.
