Seniors at Waynesburg University will be graduat-ing in less than two weeks, which will mean a number of changes in their lives. One such change is that the newly graduated students will not have to worry about obtaining financial aid for their college endeavors.
However, there is one more step that students must complete after they receive their undergradu-ate diplomas, and that is filling out what is known as an “exit interview.”“If a student has taken out a federal direct student loan, which is the most common type of student loan, they go into repay-ment six months after [the students] graduate,” said Matthew Stokan, director of financial aid at Wanesburg.
Stokan estimates that 90 percent of the current graduating class has taken out this type of loan, and those students are required by federal aid regulations to complete the exit inter-views.
Although students have the option of doing a one-on-one exit interview in the Office of Financial Aid, most decide to complete the interview and training pro-cess online.
According to Stokan, there are multiple factors that make these interviews necessary.
“The purpose of exit in-terviews is to remind the students that one, they bor-rowed student loan funds; two they’re responsible to pay back those student loan funds; three to warn them against what would happen if they went into default on those student loans; four would be to remind students that they need to work with their loan ser-vicer,” Stokan said.
The loan servicer is as-signed by the government once a student goes into repayment of their student loans. The loan servicer’s job is to make a collection of the payment from the student.
“So if you have any issues that come up and arise, if you want to discuss what your loan repayment op-tions are, whether you’re going to graduate school and you want to have those loans deferred, whether or not your having trouble making payments or things of that nature, [the loan ser-vicers] are who you work with,” said Stokan.
In short, the purpose of the exit interview is to tell a student that they have a loan and what options they would have if they struggle with making their pay-ments. For Stokan, one of the is-sues for students regarding financial aid is that they are unaware of their loans.
“They don’t realize how much they borrowed,” Sto-kan said. “As much as you try to encourage students to take responsibility, when they’re in school, let’s face it, they have a lot of things on their mind. So a lot of them don’t realize how much debt they have taken on, or what kind of pay-ments they’re looking at. So for a lot of them, it can be an eye-opening experience.”
Stokan said that most of the graduating seniors would not worry about the exit interview until after graduation, as they will be enjoying the time they have left at Waynesburg.
“Once you’re done with school, you go in normally a six-month grace period,” said Stokan. “So technically, if you pay back your loans in that six months, you don’t owe anything.”
According to Stokan, a big difference in the exit interview process is that it is “more centralized” than it was when he started 16 years ago.
“It used to be you bor-rowed from a bank,” said Stokan. “But then you had a guaranteed agency, which in [Pennsylvania] was PHEAA, who guaranteed the loan, and they also were responsible for collecting the payments on behalf of those banks.”
Now, there is a National Student Loan Debt System, where students log onto and receive their complete loan summary. Students will also be given information on their ser vicer and payments made affiliated with their account.
“So they’ve come up with that more centralized sys-tem, to make it more con-venient for borrowers to see where they stand,” said Stokan