New system delays student aid

COLUMBIA — MU students whose financial aid package includes federal PLUS loans are still waiting for their checks, and many are relying on short-term loans from the university to make ends meet.

Joe Camille, MU’s director of financial aid, estimates that about $8.6 million worth of loans through the Parent Loan for Undergraduate Students program for are still awaiting processing. The delay is caused by MU’s new student information system, myzou. Camille said because PLUS loans are made to parents, the system has had to process a great deal of information about recipients.

“Most of it is getting the software set up correctly to process the loans correctly, so we have our most technical people working on this,” said Camille.

Camille estimates that about 2,000 PLUS loan applications are awaiting processing. Students who are eligible for a refund once their tuition and other costs have been paid should expect to receive their checks by the end of September, Camille said.

Alisha Kimes, a junior at MU, has been waiting on her aid since August. Like many students, Kimes needs the money for living expenses, and the delay has led her to borrow money from her parents and boyfriend.

“This has just inconvenienced a lot of people in my life, not just me,” said Kimes.

MU is offering interest-free short-term loans to those waiting on their PLUS loan refunds. As of the end of August, MU had loaned students a total of $265,220, Camille said.

University Registrar Brenda Selman said myzou is currently in “rollout stage,” which means some problems should be expected. “While we have implemented this and tried to tailor it to university processes, there’s also a point at which you have to say we are getting the basics done, we’ve got this need met, we’ll worry about doing it better later,” Selman said.

Myzou replaces the 32-year-old STARMU system, which required each department to maintain its own databases of information. Each night STARMU was shut down to allow the systems to “talk” to each other and integrate each other’s data, Selman said. This meant that information, such as class availability and occupancy, weren’t always up to date.

“We did a snapshot of what the enrollment was, and we posted that for you and we turned it into a little Web thing and made you think you were online,” she said. “So we tried to warn you, if you had read all the (fine print), that this could be 24, 48 hours old.”

Myzou pulls together all of the information automatically.

The system also replaced the financial aide network, TigerFAN, and online payment site, Tiger Tracks.

“This system integrates all this stuff,” Camille said. “So it’s an online, real-time integrated system.”