well shit.
When I applied to USD, they granted me a $4,000 scholarship to my tuition--I chose not to do the necessary steps to obtain this scholarship at the time. Unfortunately, they also incorrectly billed me as a JD student, which increased my tuition amount by $6,000 a semester. They sent off the wrong bill to my lender, who sent the wrong amount to the school, which then disbursed this extra amount to me each semester.
I noticed the increased amount, and asked the school each semester if the figures were correct; if my bill was settled, if my tuition was paid, if my disbursement amount was correct and if I owed any money. Neither of us caught this error at each disbursement time.
Last week, the school decided to just give me the $4,000 scholarship, despite my lack of action on getting it. When they ran the figures again, they realized their mistake and sent the lender $12,000. They then applied my scholarship to this amount, leaving me owing more or less $9,000 (these figures are rounded up and down, btw). On Friday afternoon, they sent me a bill via e-mail for this $9,000 amount. When I called and spoke to them, they treated this as my error, and basically were jerks. Today, someone apologized for the error that they made and acknowledged I did nothing wrong. We may be able to increase my living expense by $1,400 or so.
Summing up: due to an error on USD's part, $7,600 of my debt is presently due and payabale.
At present, they are not willing to let me graduate without paying this full amount, which means when I apply for jobs I cannot put down an expected graduation date until I pay this off. But that was the whole purpose for this degree--to be able to tell employers that I have the LLM in taxation. So, as it stands this $60k of debt I just took on is ... well. More or less worthless when I need it most.
In addition, the ABA prevents students from working more than 20 hours a week. So I'm hobbled in how quickly I can pay this off during this semester. In theory, I MAY be able to drop it all back into the school coffers before the end of May... but I have to run the numbers and see if it will work.
All in all, that scholarship is worse than worthless. I would much preferred to have still owed $120,000 with a clear payment plan over the course of years, rather than $116,000 with $7.6 of of it being presently due and owing with a consequence of making $60,000 of the debt useless. I'm not sure what I'm going to do on this one.
I noticed the increased amount, and asked the school each semester if the figures were correct; if my bill was settled, if my tuition was paid, if my disbursement amount was correct and if I owed any money. Neither of us caught this error at each disbursement time.
Last week, the school decided to just give me the $4,000 scholarship, despite my lack of action on getting it. When they ran the figures again, they realized their mistake and sent the lender $12,000. They then applied my scholarship to this amount, leaving me owing more or less $9,000 (these figures are rounded up and down, btw). On Friday afternoon, they sent me a bill via e-mail for this $9,000 amount. When I called and spoke to them, they treated this as my error, and basically were jerks. Today, someone apologized for the error that they made and acknowledged I did nothing wrong. We may be able to increase my living expense by $1,400 or so.
Summing up: due to an error on USD's part, $7,600 of my debt is presently due and payabale.
At present, they are not willing to let me graduate without paying this full amount, which means when I apply for jobs I cannot put down an expected graduation date until I pay this off. But that was the whole purpose for this degree--to be able to tell employers that I have the LLM in taxation. So, as it stands this $60k of debt I just took on is ... well. More or less worthless when I need it most.
In addition, the ABA prevents students from working more than 20 hours a week. So I'm hobbled in how quickly I can pay this off during this semester. In theory, I MAY be able to drop it all back into the school coffers before the end of May... but I have to run the numbers and see if it will work.
All in all, that scholarship is worse than worthless. I would much preferred to have still owed $120,000 with a clear payment plan over the course of years, rather than $116,000 with $7.6 of of it being presently due and owing with a consequence of making $60,000 of the debt useless. I'm not sure what I'm going to do on this one.