Student Finance woes for Freshers
It’s September, and as I write this hundreds of thousands of people (including myself) are preparing to head off to University. It’s meant to be a fantastic time: living for yourself, getting away from home, meeting new people. But for a worryingly large amount of people it won’t be, since they’re starting term without any money. Why? Because Student Finance England haven’t processed students applications quickly enough.
For those who don’t know the full story, student loans used to be handled by the Local Education Authority (LEA). This year Student Finance England has centralised the whole process. And a fantastic job they are doing of it too: lost identification documents, applications that apparently don’t exist, and a near-useless customer support system that is facing an “unprecedented amount of calls”.
Hang on. An “unprecedented amount of calls”? They’re not running a business here. It’s not as if they’ve launched a product and unexpectedly been swamped by three times the amount of enquiries as to what they were expecting. They know how many people go to university each year; they should know, resonably accurately, how many applications they are going to receive. Granted, there’s been an upturn in applicants this year, but the difference is fairly insignificant. The system, it seems, simply can’t cope.
I’m one of the lucky ones. After trying and failing to apply online, I sent my application through by post.From there things went through relatively smoothly. Mine wasn’t means tested which means that there are no extra hoops to jump through. The fact that I spent hours in the phone queue waiting to talk to advisors (who then tried to tell me my date of birth was wrong) and an overly confusing application form, I finally got through it.
I can normally accept faults in a system providing that – if things do go wrong – you can pick up the phone and solve the problem quickly and easily. My problems were minor on the whole, but for others problems have been much more complex. The customer support seem unable to help people too.
It remains to be seen how quickly this is solved. Today’s figures say that 50,000 students are still left without funding. With some having already started their course, the time is ticking for Student Finance England to sort things out.
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