This should have been Michael Javurek's sophomore year at Loyola, but when his parents could no longer afford having three kids in college, Javurek had to make the hard decision to sacrifice his dream school and leave his friends.
According to the Director of Student Financial Assistance at Loyola, Eric Weems, middle class families like Javurek's take the hardest hits from the present economic downturn and usually get a bad deal in financial aid.
"One of the things that we have for students in the middle class is that they will receive assistance primarily from the university, so your opportunities for assistance are a lot less," Weems said. "In many cases, those are exactly the individuals that I am speaking of who have been most affected. The neediest students typically are not going to come in and be quite as affected by some of the economic factors because they are not going to a situation where they are running their own business or something of that nature."
Javurek's mom is a therapist and his father runs his own logistics business, but the credit markets are tighter and there are fewer lenders making loans available to students. Loyola even revised his financial aid award package, which came through three days before the beginning of this fall semester, but it still wasn't enough. So Javurek had to go to a less expensive university that offered more financial aid.
"My siblings did not have to sacrifice their college experience. That was actually a big factor in my decision," Javurek said in a series of e-mail messages from Ashland University in Ohio. "I decided to sacrifice mine so they did not have to. Mine was by far the most expensive."
Javurek said he was depressed when he found out he couldn't return to Loyola. The most difficult thing was telling his friends.
"I made some of the best friends of my entire life in just one year at Loyola, and to say I would no longer be with them was heartbreaking," Javurek said.
As heart-wrenching as Javurek's story has been, Weems said that this year has been business as usual, and the financial hardships of students at Loyola are not more than they have seen in the past. However, he does note that the number of parents taking out Parent Plus loans, which are low interest federal loans to cover education costs for their children, has remained level compared to last year's number.
"We are seeing consistent numbers with the prior year, so the thinking there is that we are seeing more students whose parents have kind of hit that wall of any number of things," Weems said.
Though according to the New York Times, experts have yet to declare the current economic downturn an official "recession," many families could have hit one of the several "walls" that Weems referred to.
For one, the national unemployment rate jumped above six percent this August, the highest rate in five years, while rising fuel and food prices are making millions of consumers feel the pinch. Combined with the crisis in the housing sector that lingered through this summer and sent a record number of American homes into foreclosure, Loyola's $38,796 sticker price for tuition, room and board and other fees can seem even more daunting.
Weems also pointed out that many parents probably planned to finance children's college educations with mortgage loans on their homes, but the current economic situation has thrown them off.
Weems, however, did stress that students who are in trouble financially need to take that first step of going to the Hub at the Sullivan Center for Student Services. According to him, one of the biggest problems he has with helping students is that they don't tell anybody what they are going through.
"It is always good to be in touch with the Student Services Hub as a starting point to initiate that appeal and re-evaluation of the new circumstance. It may not always be a case where there's an exact, 'This is exactly what you can do,' but we can talk about [what] those next steps need to be," Weems said.
However, the financial aid department can't help everybody. According to Weems, about 25 percent of Loyola's undergraduate students receive the Pell Grant, which is used as a measure of the neediest students at colleges. He also stressed the university's continued commitment to reaching out to students in need, sometimes to the detriment of other students who would have received assistance based on merit.
"More and more parents have come to a student's junior [or] senior year in high school realizing that they haven't been able to set aside the savings and they are going to rely on the financial aid to make that happen," said Weems. "Financial aid is a bridge. It's a bridge between where you are in terms of your capacity and the costs themselves."
While that bridge didn't get Javurek to the other side, he is still going to try again next semester. "I have come to the realization that I belong at Loyola no matter the costs. I love Chicago, the school, the people and the experiences," said Javurek. "I love my friends there and cannot wait to get back to them."
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