Hi,

I am graduate student that is taking prereq's to gain full admission to my program. On the graduate degree plan that I had to sign, along with my advisor, it listed two plans to finish the required prereq's. One had graduate classes listed, the other had undergrad classes listed, but I was told that I could take a mix of both or pick one or the other. I took Undergraduate classes last term and received grad loans to pay for school and other expenses, I took Undergraduate classes again this term and received grad loans again. Four weeks in to the term I got a call from my schools financial aid department saying that I was ineligible for the loans that I have already received for this term and last term and that I must pay the school back for the loan money that I received. At this time my account is listed as me owing the school loan money plus tuition for the past two terms, but according to the department of education my loans have not been cancelled.

According to the federal student aid hanbook, " If the overaward situation occurs after Direct Loan funds have been fully disbursed, you do not need to adjust it. However, you might have to adjust the aid package to prevent an overaward of Campus-Based funds.

Although a school isn’t required to return Stafford Loan funds that were disbursed to the borrower (either directly or by applying them to the student account) before the overaward situation occurred, the law doesn’t prevent your school from returning funds that were applied to the student account if you choose to do so. A borrower who receives a direct payment of loan funds is not required to repay an overawarded amount, unless the overaward was caused by his or her misreporting or withholding information." I might be reading in to it too much but it seems to say in the last sentence that unless I misreported or withheld information (which I didn't) that I am not required to pay back that money to the school. For anyone wondering an "Overaward/ Overpayment" also refers to when a student receives loan money that they were not eligible for. Anybody have any thoughts ? Comments ? Experiences with stuff like this ?

Anybody have any thoughts on this ?

These types of situations are tricky because while the DOE may not require a school to rescind over-awarded loans, there is room for schools to make their own policies on this. It's most likely a school policy that over-awarded loans must be repaid the difference.

My suggestion would be to simply bring this up to your financial aid office and see if there is anything they can do.

The customers seeking loan on call must be get aware of the right ways of doing this and solving their problems.