El Camino College’s Financial Aid Office puts student callers on hold immediately and for long periods of time without addressing the student or their reason for contact.
Students wait an average of two hours and 30 minutes until a real person is connected to the caller, according to a series of test calls The Union made over a four-week period.
ECC isn’t the only college with large wait times but it is the college with the longest wait time that The Union reviewed in Southern California the highest time out of the four other community colleges selected.
“The assistant works at the financial aid lab so a lot of what they do is just try and figure out what the problem is and troubleshoot as they go as well,” David Brown, the assistant director of the Financial Aid Office said. “Most of the time, we will be on the phone actually working with students and phone calls will keep coming in and we can’t switch over since we only have one line so we can only answer so many calls at a time.”
The second-highest financial aid call wait time recorded was Riverside City College with an average hold time of one hour and 30 minutes.
Financial aid phone lines are supposed to be used for students and staff to ask questions or raise concerns which is now limited by the long wait time in place.
ECC has a population of 21,000 students this semester and 78% of those students are relying on financial aid from the college, a total of 17,160 people.
Currently, ECC is training some students to assist with the needs of the department which would include answering phones.
RCC has 15,317 of its students using its financial aid resources, 80% of RCC’s population, which sits at 19,147 students.
With only a 1,843 student difference, the average hold time for RCC dropped a whole hour. With Cerritos College and Palomar College not too far behind RCC in terms of financial aid students, the college’s times dropped by another hour.
Palomar has a population of 31,519 students, yet only 48% use financial aid resulting in 15,129 students.
The college has 188 fewer students on financial aid than RCC, yet the hold time for its students is down by 60 minutes.
Cerritos on the other hand, has 2,115 students less than Palomar even though its wait time is the same. The population of Cerritos is 21,335 students which means 61% of its students use its financial aid department.
Jamie Quiroz, Cerritos College’s financial aid assistant director, said eight employees answer the phone.
“It can vary if we have everyone in or if people are out on vacation, but I normally have eight financial aid technicians full-time staff,” Quiroz said.
There are at least four staff members working the phones each shift to ensure students receive financial help, Quiroz said.
ECC doesn’t have selected staff members who are paid and responsible for only answering the phones.
Financial aid assistants at El Camino help answer the phones when possible, but don’t usually have their full attention on the phone line or the person on the other end of the phone, Brown said.
“We are also hiring student workers at the moment and waiting for those to get processed and approved,” Brown said. “This has been ongoing for the past six weeks or so, we are supposed to get about six new student workers into the office to also assist with students checking in at the front counter and answering phone calls.”
Multiple students have expressed they are discouraged from reaching out to the financial aid department altogether as a whole.
“I call and they hang up,” Jay Briggs, 26, film major said. “Sometimes when I show up, it’s like ‘Oh we’re busy’ they don’t have any appointments so it’s been really hard.”
Briggs is not the only student who has had a negative experience with receiving assistance.
Allison Bernal, 18, a radiology major said the time the financial aid lab is usually full is at around 2 p.m. but they just need more workers to help.
Some students have even gone as far as to say the assistance they received was unhelpful or a waste of time and effort.
“Phone, and then email, and then eventually, after they didn’t respond to my email for days, I just decided to go to the main office,” Arden Coloma, 19, a computer hardware major said.
Pierce College has a population of 16,916 students, while around 12,687 students use financial aid.
Approximately 75.6% of Pierce’s population relies on its financial aid department, it has no hold wait time.
Pierce runs its department differently than ECC does, Jennifer Lopez, Pierce’s Financial Aid manager, said has not received any reports of complaints from students.
“We do have an outgoing message stating we will return messages in between 48 hours,” Lopez said. “Unfortunately, we don’t have enough staff to actually answer phones while doing so in person.”
