Information at California Lutheran University is just one call away, or is it? The private school that seems to admit more students than they can handle seems to have the problem of one office not talking to the other.

On a campus that is the size of a small village and your longest walk might be five minutes, you feel like it wouldn’t be that much of a problem for questions and information to get from one side to another. Wrong.

As a student, I have had my fair share of problems that have added more stress to my parents’ lives and my life, and all of it could’ve been fixed with one phone call to check if all the information they had was correct.

Student Accounts, Financial Aid office, Registrar, and everything in between. You name it, and there’s some sort of miscommunication or no communication at all between the offices that recieve information from students..

As many other students have, I had my fair share of struggles in college and some of those struggles have come in the classroom, which has brought my GPA down to a level no one ever expects to see.

That number is 2.0 and you look at that number and just think, “wow that’s bad,” but according to Cal Lutheran a student must keep a GPA above that number in order to continue to receive their financial aid.

If it drops below that they will be placed on academic suspension and will lose financial aid until that number comes up above the 2.0, according to the Financial aid website.

That’s where my first story falls into place. My sophomore year here at this university I went the whole year with what I thought was below that minimum mark. Knowing this my parents had to come up with a way to pay for all the dues and this came to hurt them and myself financially.

Coming from Texas I am not able to just drive home on the weekend and have home cooked meals, or even throw my stuff in the wash for free. And for everyone who thinks getting a job would help, I am also a part of an athletic team on campus and that takes much of my time away as well as classes.

So after going the whole year with the idea that I wasn’t financially secure I came to realize that something didn’t match up. I had realized that the GPA I was seeing on my Blackboard account didn’t match the numbers I was receiving from faculty on campus.

After a lot of communication from my father and myself with the financial office, we came to find out that the number was indeed wrong and the whole semester I was, in fact, eligible for financial aid. And that’s just the first of many.

It seems that I am not the only one either. A student who stated they wanted to remain anonymous had problems, except this time with registrar and classes.

“I got into an English class when I signed up for the semester. Then about two days before classes started I realized I was then put on the wait list,” the student said.

Now it seems this would be an easy fix and there could be an email sent letting the student know about what had happened, but instead no contact was made and the student was left to, “scramble around to find an English class that would fit my busy schedule,” the student said.

“They always find a way to mess things up on tuition, scheduling, or account holds derailing any progress you had going. Nobody is ever on the same page and each department gives conflicting information on the same question” according to an anonymous review from http://www.studentsreview.com, and there are many more where that came from.

This seems to be a problem that students other than myself are facing here at the university and it is simply unacceptable. Something as easy as a phone call to gather or even relay information is one fix that comes to mind when speaking about this situation, but it’s not something that seems to ring in the head of those in charge.

Gabriel Naudin
Staff Writer