UB seeks repayment of $440,000 in excess financial aid
Miscalculations snag at least 134 students
The University at Buffalo mistakenly gave too much financial aid this year to 134 students — probably more — who will have to pay back thousands of dollars.
A total of $440,000 in federal aid was excessively awarded to 70 UB students who are veterans and 64 who serve as resident advisers, according to university officials.
The students will have until May to pay back anywhere from $90 to as much as $12,000. The average amount is $3,283.
“It has already impacted me horribly,” said James Raymond, an Army veteran who served in Afghanistan. “I am forced to take a semester off because I currently owe the university $1,000.”
Many more students could be affected.
UB also believes it awarded too much federal aid to an untold number of students who received scholarship money, but the university still is trying to sort that out.
In calculating the eligible amount of federal loans and grants, UB didn’t consider financial benefits the students received from other sources, explained Michael Ryan, vice provost for undergraduate education.
Some military veterans, for example, received aid through the Department of Veteran Affairs, while resident advisers got free room or board. Both, Ryan said, should have been counted when calculating federal aid. But because they weren’t, the awards were more generous than they should have been.
“From my position,” Ryan said, “ethically and legally, the institution had no choice but to correct this problem when it was brought to our attention.”
The mistake was spotted in August — after the federal aid already had been awarded — when UB voluntarily asked the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators to do an audit, or peer review, at the university.
Once the organization turned up UB’s oversight, federal aid packages were recalculated for these students.
Military veterans were first notified of the mistake in September.
Last month, resident advisers were informed.
“All of a sudden, my zero balance became $2,937,” said Abie Boukai, a third-year resident adviser. “I started freaking out.”
Boukai doesn’t understand why his job of resident adviser is being counted as aid.
He already has a couple of other jobs and doesn’t know how he would come up with the additional $3,000 this late in the year.
“If I had known this was going to happen, do you think I would have taken this [resident adviser] job?” he said.
Failure to correct the problem could have resulted in penalties or fines for UB, or maybe even the loss of federal funding, Ryan said.
“I knew students wouldn’t be happy with it,” Ryan said, “but I think we couldn’t knowingly overpackage them.”
One more group will be affected by the error — students who received some form of scholarship.
Scholarships that UB hands out are included in financial aid calculations, but other scholarships — awarded by civic groups or businesses, for example — have not always been counted, Ryan said.
Students affected by that — and it could be many — will be alerted as soon as UB knows more.
“That’s a little bit more difficult to get our arms around, but we have been working on that,” Ryan said. “It could be a large number, but the awards typically are smaller amounts, so the student impact is not likely to be significant.”
Ryan has apologized to students for the error.
“This is really surprising to us how we could have overlooked this,” Ryan said.
Ryan didn’t point fingers but noted that, several years ago, the financial aid office moved away from a more traditional model — one with a financial aid director overseeing operations — to one with less of a hierarchy, where the errors weren’t caught.
UB has since returned to the traditional model and recently hired a financial aid director.
The university, meanwhile, is trying to work with the students, Ryan said.
Boukai, a senior, said he met with a financial aid officer, who told him he would get more aid if he quit as a resident adviser next semester and moved off campus. So that’s what he will do.
Still, the aid will consist of loans that he will have to pay back.
Some of these students haven’t spent all the money they were awarded, UB officials noted.
Right now, whether the error might force some to leave school, because they can’t afford to pay, remained unclear.
“We’re going to do everything we can so that’s not the case,” Ryan said. “That’s not an outcome we want.”
But Raymond, who has had his share of issues over the past several months, might find himself in that situation.
He was honorably discharged for injuries suffered in the war, but as a reservist, he had been ordered to report for duty earlier this year, until pressure from local members of Congress ensured he wouldn’t be deployed.
After returning to UB this fall, he was notified of the error in aid. He will take next semester off to work and pay back the money he owes.
He described the problem as an injustice for veterans.
“I enjoy attending the university but will have to derail my plans of graduating until I can personally afford to attend college,” Raymond said.
