GULC goes CLanG! or GLiCh!

I’m looking at the award letter from GULC and I’m thinking, “Is this a joke?”

I mean, it’s got to be a joke.

Compared to every single other offer this is absolutely appalling.

Looking at the accompanying “helpful advice letter” I have to wonder if this is just an institution-wide thing, or the figures have been mail merged for me alone.

Among such useful bits of advice for making sense of this “budget” (which makes no sense) is “If you have credit card debt, pay it down, or better yet, eliminate it entirely.” Oh (Light Bulb goes off above Scoplaw’s Head) that’s a brilliant fucking idea. Why did I never think of it? I’ll just click my ruby slippers together and eliminate my credit card debt entirely! The medical debt will be the next to go! Then those pesky student loans!

Other gems (which prompted the institution/merge wondering):

“We estimate that your loan debt upon graduation from GULC will be $55,000 in Federal Stafford and Unsubsidized Federal Stafford loans and approximately $18,000 - $45,000 in commercial student loans. Monthly loan payments on these loans will average $975-1465 over ten years under the current federal and Law Center repayment requirements.”

and

“Live like a student while you’re in school so you don’t have to live like a student later.”

Let me show off my literary training. The above is known as “irony” both on the face of it and given the following:

1) Those of us with existing undergraduate and graduate debt (perhaps I’ll just “eliminate that entirely” – what a great idea!) are going to owe way more than that.

2) The GULC figures are very conservative, given that their own total budget is $48,000 per the Nine Month academic year.

Perhaps aliens will come down from the mother ship (currently somewhere above Mexico) and suck up the time and cost difference – God knows they’ve already made off with the brains of whomever devised this mysterious and undisclosed “Grant Eligibility Index”.

The condescending and out of touch tone of the whole thing suggests that the author missed their true calling as one of Bush’s economic advisors.

***

I’ll be calling the aid office on Monday, obviously, and will gently and politely massage whomever I get to review my file.

Perhaps there’s a glitch somewhere (the divorced parent situation always bites me in the ass – schools like to count all the income but not all the individuals and expenses in the actual households). But while we’re on that subject (parent’s contributing), I have to say, I’m over 30, have lived apart from them for 10 years and legally, I’m pretty sure I’m considered a separate adult. I mean, if I can’t take them to court to collect their “contribution” to my education, does Georgetown have any grounds for expecting it will be produced? Let’s say it’s a shaky moral leg the parental contribution rests on – what if my parents abused me? Does Georgetown have a right to demand I interact with them, that I beg them for money?

Grr.

***

In other mail news, UConn just offered me another scholarship. This makes the cost of a year’s tuition at UConn come within two thousand dollars of my entire 3 year grant offer from Georgetown. Or to make another comparison, UConn’s total tuition costs would be less than one year at Georgetown.

***

I don’t want to sound like an ungrateful brat or anything (which I probably am, but that’s beside the point) – but I’m just going on the assumption that schools overcharge on tuition then repeal it in various ways for needy students. In this case my sense of. . .what it is really? Not outrage over, nor anger for, nor disgust at, nor embarrassment for, nor being spurned by, but something rather like all of them. In any event, my emotional response is probably due to the fact that the Georgetown offer is so completely out of line with the offers I’ve gotten from all the other schools that accepted me. I expected it to be the least. I didn’t expect it to be only nominal.

Obviously all schools must have a similar system of need assessment, given their published figures for aid awarded and their public statements of equitable need-based distribution. Brothers and Sisters, I kid you not – I am needy and it seems all the other schools had no problem realizing this and offering fair packages. So either Georgetown didn’t (glitch), or they did and sent me a “fuck off” offer, in which case they could have simply typed that and given me the conversational distinction of not receiving any school based aid.

This kind of stuff gets my fighting blood up. It all goes back to economic class and the winnowing of social (or should I say “civic” or "civil"?) opportunities.

I need to take a deep breath and think about the LRAP (the great equalizer). Or go biking. Biking it is!

I’ll be all smiles and politely concerned graciousness by Monday (or would be this evening, if I had to be). But right now I’m just going to indulge the dark side.

Comments

[dubitante]

Your frustration with GULC fin aid is well-founded. I, too, had to deal with the divorced parents situation and it undoubtedly works to your disadvantage. As for being "indpendent" from your parents, virtually impossible. And the same holds true at most of the private schools I dealt with prior to signing on with GULC. Interesting that you mention it, but the ONLY way you can avoid the parental contribution factor is if your parents abused and it would be unsafe or otherwise unreasonable to ask you to contact them. You can, however, get a Federal Perkins loan to cover the parental/student contribution since you're over 26.

I agree, it's ridiculous. But, we have to remember with what we are dealing. We are dealing with a private institution where many of the students' parents can and do contribute heavily to their fees. During orientation last fall, I was talking with a girl who honestly thought the total cost of attending GULC was $12K (obviously she's not signing the promissory notes). From my many conversations with GULC fin aid (and GW and...), I have been told it's the only possible way to truly put everyone on an even playing field. And, to some extent, that's true (except for us unfortunate children of broken homes).

[Jim]

I completely sympathize with your annoyance. I asked someone in NYU's admissions department why they would want my parents' financial information as well as my own. The answer, as you said, was "because we don't want people to take advantage of us by having their parents pay." I was pretty annoyed (offended actually), given that I've been out of school for 6 years, am married and have a mortgage.

Please do take seriously the high cost of living here in DC. It's not as expensive as Boston, New York or San Francisco, but by any normal definition, it's extremely pricey.

[Scheherazade]

Dude. Go to UConn. Debt sucks. Don't get trapped someplace you don't want to be because of the price tag of your law school.

You're going to love studying the law -- it's fascinating and engrossing and absorbing. As long as there are a handful of challenging, dedicated professors and a dozen or two motivated and bright classmates, you are going to have the guides and the companionship you need for a wonderful journey into a really compelling subject. The bulk of your law school journey will be between the covers of your casebook and in your brain as you struggle with the new materials. I'm not sure the difference in law schools -- facilities, prestige, clinics, etc. -- is worth a financial scenario that will dramatically limit your post-grad options.

Best of luck, my friend.

[dubitante]

On the other hand, one could argue that the lack of those things --facilities, prestige, clinics, etc.-- can also dramatically limit your post-grad options...

But, I agree, the most pressing problem with legal education today is the skyrocketing cost. The repurcussions ripple far beyond the individual debt-ridden student and, I think, are a chief contributor to the overall decline of legal practice from a self-regulating and (despite popular opinion) honorable profession into a cutthroat business, concerned only with the bottom line. Debt burden pushes many people into practice settings in which they don't want to be. While there, the pressures to please the bottom line push ethics, morality, family life, etc. to the wayside and the whole profession (and, one could argue, society-at-large) suffers.