Financial Aid: A Facade of Support

Financial aid is one of, if not the most important factor for any student’s decision to attend a university. As such, we are “fortunate” to be attending a campus that is not only need-blind, but also allegedly meets the full need of all students enrolled in the aid program. But what does it mean to meet full demonstrated need? Who are the agents involved in this process? In this opinion piece, I will put my views on a much needed debate on whether financial aid is truly fair, and if it is truly a progressive system.

First of all, financial aid automatically assumes that all parents are perfect guardians, looking after their offspring and willing to pay for their expenses. According to the CDC, at least one in seven children have experienced abuse or neglect from their parents in just the past year alone. This is problematic because while universities (like Georgetown University in Qatar) calculate financial aid according to a student’s total household income and assets, many students are left to find income for the remaining uncovered costs themselves, as parents neglect their children. While this might not be the case for everyone, one in seven is a huge number and affects a large portion of university students. Some universities have emergency funds to support students in times of severe neglect, however they are often one time only and are not publicised enough. So, students are often left hanging to find other forms of support; overworking themselves, working illegally, or even at times stealing. Financial aid systems at GU-Q and across universities should address these issues, taking into consideration that a few numbers and dollar signs do not fully reflect a student’s ability to pay.

One solution, especially for food insecure students, would be the establishment of a food bank. This form of support exists  within many universities in the United States, but has “unfortunately” not found a way to an elite university which had an estimated expense budget of almost 60 million dollars way back in 2014. Even our next door neighbour, Northwestern University in Qatar,  has a free—though insufficient—grab-and-go pantry that was started after students complained about food insecurity on campus. So, it is time for GU-Q to see financial status and problems as more than just numbers. As liberal arts students, we are encouraged to think of problems from outside the box: and this one seems like a very visible one. Efforts to open a food pantry/bank have been attempted by students in the past, but they have gone largely ignored by the administration citing the (not so) comprehensive financial aid system at GU-Q.

However, the problem goes beyond the perfect parent assumption problem. As with all the other problems in the world, financial aid systems unjustly discriminate against students coming from poorer, “third world countries.” Universities like GU-Q commonly use a data set that gives out average cost of living in countries. That cost is factored into financial aid to determine how much income a family earns and calculate its difference to the cost of living. A large difference generally signifies a larger cost of attendance and vice versa. But it is important to acknowledge that a family that spends somewhere around the average cost of living in India doesn’t have the same quality of living as compared to an American family whose expense meets the average cost of living in the USA. A middle class family in the US may be able to source fresh food with minimal amounts of pesticides due to the pesticide regulations in America. However, a “similar” family in India would have to eat pesticide-ridden food and might have to resort to more expensive, luxury tagged items to find organic, fresh food. As such, families in poorer countries are stripped of their ability to have quality lives compared to their counterparts in richer countries who generally have higher average use of technologies and energy factored into their average cost of living. Financial aid, which is supposed to be fair and considering of a student’s financial needs, finds itself to be even more discriminatory instead.

More than that, poorer countries often face volatile economic conditions, inflated real estate prices, or just unsellable assets. Households in these countries find ways towards illegal tax cut loopholes to just feed their mouths and often do not have proper legal documents. However, financial aid is a document based business, and informality does not really find its way into it. What if a student has parents who work as  informal businessmen, street sellers or hawkers? There will be no official tax documents to provide, which will probably put students into a circle of doubt within the aid office.

As much as the administration tries to hide or get away with the problems, all of these problems are imminent, real and do exist at GU-Q. As such, we require further conversation in this pivotal factor to entering to university life and not just discourse, but a clear pragmatic way to solve this objective mess towards subjective breakthrough.