PeopleSoft delays student award packages

By Michael Kostecka

Glitches in Information Technology's attempt to initiate the PeopleSoft system on campus caused major delays in the financial aid award processing during the summer and fall, making life extremely difficult for returning students awaiting aid. This situation has led to a great deal of animosity between many students and the financial aid department."I think the whole thing is screwed up and it sucks for students who depend on aid to go to this school," junior Ken Kirby said.

Yahoo.com Internet Life ranked Santa Clara University the 54th most "wired" campus in the nation this month. With that communication success has come a great many problems, as the campus administration attempts to stay modern in all facets of university life.

Perhaps nothing of this manner has affected students more this year than the integration of the school's various administrative software systems into one unit named PeopleSoft.

The transfer to PeopleSoft began nearly two years ago, when the university was looking for a way to make their administrative software viable past the year 2000. Instead of fixing the anticipated Y2K bug, the administration decided, with the help of Information Technology, to transfer to a system that could keep pace with the rapid expansion of technology.

"We are positioning ourselves for the future with PeopleSoft," Associate Director of Service and Systems John Bright said. "We needed to get back as much time as possible with the investment in a new product. With the room for upgrades in the PeopleSoft system, this could take us through 10 or 15 more years."

Unfortunately, integrating the system has been less than smooth in many areas, the financial aid situation the most evident.

"Financial aid has been a real disappointment," Bright said.

Santa Clara University was the 11th school out of 19 to test the PeopleSoft system, one of the early litmus tests. After the program integration was well on its way, problems began to develop with the financial aid department's software transfer.

It turned out that SCU was the only direct lending school out of all the guinea pigs, something PeopleSoft failed to realize. Direct lending schools deal with the federal government directly when giving student loans. Unlike most other universities, private banks are left out of the equation. So PeopleSoft was unable to perform all the needed operations to award financial aid packages.After the final stage of a four-part software installment failed to produce the expected results, Information Technology knew there was trouble and notified the financial aid department that the PeopleSoft system could not currently process the aid packages.

Once the problem was identified, the department made the disbursement of aid to freshman top priority.

"We used the old Access database to package the freshman awards," Financial Aid Counselor Sandra Hayes said. "Unfortunately, the volume of information required to package awards for returning students was too great."

When the financial aid department realized it would not be able to send award packages out on time, they worked in collaboration with Student Accounts to enclose a notification letter with the tuition reminders early in the summer. The letter advised students who had yet to receive their packages to base their estimates off last year's awards. They then proceeded by hand to try and finish all returning students' award packages.

"I want the university community to realize what an extraordinary, understanding and tenacious [financial aid] staff the school has," Hayes said. "They gave up vacations and came in when they were sick in order to get everything done."

Still, communication between financial aid and the student body seemed muddled in many instances. Posted on the Financial Aid Web page is an aid disbursement timeline claiming packages would be sent out no later than late July.

Many students are still angry.

"I waited all summer for my financial aid packet but it never came," senior Laurie Lasseter said. "It turns out that I didn't get any aid, so now I have to fill out loan applications."