For a high school senior, the worst part about filling out the College Board CSS/Financial Aid PROFILE is not the $9 fee. Nor is it the additional $16 charge per college. The real tribulations begin with the page that appears after you've "finished" submitting. It lists mysterious codes that correspond to an onslaught of directives, specifying further steps each college requires you take before it can meet your demonstrated need.
Breathe. Through your nose. That's what I tell my little sister.
My sister and I are four years apart, which makes graduation something of a revolving door experience. Every four years she suddenly finds herself facing those challenges that are suddenly no longer mine.
Eileen, however, was born wielding her bootstraps like reins. She did not solicit my college knowledge this past December in applying for admission. She saved the rare appeal to my infinite wisdom for the really hard part: applying for financial aid.
Indeed, the CSS remains fresh in my annually refreshed mind. Duke is great, and this greatness is reflected in our message code. We have one letter: H. According to the code key, H means that Duke, like Stanford and Dartmouth, uses the College Board's Institutional Documentation Service. In short, you can send your tax forms to a central location and be done with the three or four colleges on your list that recognize the practical genius of this option.
If you're a senior so unlucky as to have applied to, say, the University of Pennsylvania, no fewer than eight letters appear next to the esteemed name. This is in part simply because Penn outlines everything you would otherwise send in one surge to the IDOC. Except Penn also requires that you send in not one but two years' worth of tax forms. And Penn and Princeton both ask that the prospective student fill out another school-specific financial aid application, in addition to sending the W-2s, 1040As, Business/Farm supplements and the whole shebang separately to their respective institutions.
It's not up to colleges to compensate for all of the injustices that prevail at every level of the American education system. But it doesn't make sense for colleges to create their own, either.
The long-enduring quirks in the aid application process are merely symptomatic of a larger problem. We are big-picture people, and our expansive vision for financial aid too often dovetails with a narrow understanding of what constitutes discussion-worthy socioeconomic barriers to the country's elite colleges. We fixate on fixing the vast wilderness of social disparities perpetuated by those "other" institutions-school boards, local legislatures, federal agencies. It's easy to miss the individual trees, growing in our own backyard, blotting out the sun for those students without access to our perch up in the canopy.
We lose our heads debating things like socioeconomic affirmative action-usually referenced as a kind of panacea to the problems presented by every other kind of affirmative action-before considering whether there is something that could be done to eliminate absurdities like official and unofficial financial aid fees. It's as though our focus on our own selection criteria blinds us to the importance of students' selection criteria-that is, for determining which schools are and are not within their reach.
For example, not every student in the United States is able to photocopy, print, mail and re-mail enormous swaths of paper. Could we perhaps lead the charge in pushing the aid process to go digital, thereby putting another set of teeth into the promise to make an elite education accessible to all?
This past year, 346 colleges and universities helped streamline the application process for more than a hundred thousand college students through the online Common App. Is there no way for colleges to make a similar mass effort to use the IDOC, and better yet, enhance the IDOC with an online option? After all, many libraries offer free scanning services. It would serve us well to remember that ePrint, on the other hand, is a uniquely Duke phenomenon.
There is great injustice in the fact that some students get a shoddy education that dictates their post-secondary plans long before they finish high school. And there is injustice, too, in the simple reality that something as "small" as a $4 airmail sticker, a $16 CSS fee, a $150 plane ticket may add to the aura of impregnability that prevents some students from believing a Duke education possible.
Like me, Eileen is fortunate. She has grown up in a family in which scaling Mount Everest is the benign expectation if it means the difference between going to the local college and attending the university of her dreams. But if the aid process was daunting for her, I can only imagine the fatal effect on someone who does not have a sibling with firsthand knowledge of how incredibly generous an elite institution like Duke can ultimately be.
Jane Chong is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Tuesday.
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