Dear grads,
Yesterday, the Financial Aid office sent an email to many instructors titled “Action Required: Message from UCSC Financial Aid and Scholarship Office”. This email included a list of some of their students, and asked instructors to post grades for the listed students by tomorrow, January 10, even if those grades are ultimately incorrect due to missing information and will need to be changed later.
As a result of this email, many grads and instructors are feeling renewed pressure to submit grades. However, we have reason to believe that this email may be misleading and many of these students are not at risk of having their financial aid withheld.
Our message is still: don’t submit, unless you hear from us.
We have included a template email below this message to send to the instructors you TA for.
We have been aware that some undergraduates are subject to quarterly review of their grades in order for their financial aid to be disbursed, which is one of the special cases in which grads have been submitting official grades. However, we have multiple reasons to believe that many of the students listed in the email are not in that situation:
- We have verified that at least some of the students on these lists are not on quarterly review and have had no interruption whatsoever of their financial aid.
- We have been told by the Financial Aid office on multiple occasions (prior to this email) that only a very small percentage of students require quarterly academic review for the disbursement of their aid, and the number of students listed on these most recent emails from Financial Aid is much higher than what we would have expected.
- It seems highly unlikely that if Financial Aid needed those grades in order to disburse aid, they would have waited 11 days past the disbursement date to ask for them.
- Additionally, if students’ financial aid had been withheld due to the strike, they would know by now, and would likely have reached out already to request their grades themselves.
- Beyond our own doubts about the demand for so many grades at this time, we have heard similar concerns from faculty who are knowledgeable about financial aid processes. They are suspicious of the fact that grades are being demanded for large numbers of their students, with a very vague explanation and only two days’ notice.
For all these reasons, we believe that many of the students listed on these emails are not in imminent danger of having their aid withheld, and are advising grads and faculty not to submit grades at this time while we continue to gather information. We will send another email by tomorrow (which is the date Financial Aid gave to submit grades) titled “URGENT: FINANCIAL AID UPDATE” with more information and advice on how to proceed.
We feel that it is unfair that the university is trying to use our phrasing of “no questions asked” as a means to pressure students to ask for grades, regardless of the particularities of their situation. If it is not clear from context, “no questions asked” may be better articulated as “no questions asked about your situation, but we will help you assess the urgency of your situation for yourself”. This does not mean that we will not try to keep students informed about when, and when not, missing grades may immediately harm them. We encourage you to open communication with your students about this and other concerns, while not pressuring them to share any information they do not feel comfortable sharing.
Please see below for a template you can use to communicate with faculty about this issue.
In solidarity,
Roxy Davis, M.A.
Graduate Student, Department of Psychology
Dear [xxx],
Thank you for your patience during this strike.
We intend to withhold the grades asked for in this email until we are better informed. We will have more information by tomorrow from organizers, before the deadline stated by the Financial Aid office. Should there still be any ambiguity about these grades, we will post them immediately.
We hope that this does not appear unnecessarily obstinate, but it is essential that we remain firm in our commitment to our strike action. We have multiple reasons to believe that this email from Financial Aid may be misleading, and that the students listed may not actually be in danger of any negative consequences from withheld grades. Here are our reasons for suspicion:
- We have verified that at least some of the students on these lists are not on quarterly review and have had no interruption whatsoever of their financial aid.
- We have been told by the Financial Aid office on multiple occasions (prior to this email) that only a very small percentage of students require quarterly academic review for the disbursement of their aid, and the number of students listed on these most recent emails from Financial Aid is much higher than what we would have expected.
- It also seems highly unlikely that if Financial Aid needed those grades in order to disburse aid, they would have waited 11 days past the disbursement date to ask for them.
- Additionally, if students’ financial aid had been withheld due to the strike, they would know by now, and would likely have reached out already to request their grades themselves.
- Beyond our own doubts about the demand for so many grades at this time, we have heard similar concerns from faculty who are knowledgeable about financial aid processes. They are suspicious of the fact that grades are being demanded for large numbers of their students, with a very vague explanation and only two days’ notice.
It has come to our attention that the Financial Aid office is encouraging you to fabricate temporary grades for the students on this list if your TAs do not provide you with grades. The implication in Ms. Rodriguez’s email is that if you don’t “fill in the blank,” you will cause these undergraduates to be deprived of their financial aid. We believe that plugging in an incomplete “soft grade” increases the risks of potential harm to students and urge you not to do so.
Thank you again for your patience during the strike. We care deeply about our students, and we need a COLA to do our best for them. Our working conditions are their learning conditions, and we are striving to improve both.
Sincerely,
[xxx]