Blaming the computer

What is most amazing about a semester-long computer foulup within the University of Maine System is the patience of students who have been denied the financial-aid checks that many of them need in order to both go to school and pay rent and eat. Their overlong wait, however, should be unacceptable to the public.

The short version of what went wrong is that the university system decided this year to use and help modify new computer software, called Wolfpack, to cut financial-aid checks to students. System officials knew by August that the program did not work. The old system no longer was operating and no one, it seemed, was able to immediately start writing the checks by hand. Now, three-fourths of the way through the semester, with some students forced to give up their housing and others to go without textbooks, the system may have gotten the flow of checks moving.

If this sounds like an simple computer glitch, it is not. It is a depressing example of how this system could let the very people it is established to serve do without and then blame the problem on a computer. The situation is particularly acute at the University of Maine at Augusta, which has a tiny administration and a geographically dispersed student body. Staff from other universities within the system worked hard to help UMA, but many students there still don’t have the aid they were supposed to receive months ago.

Students have had to borrow from family and friends to pay their bills. They have gone without meals and heat. One reports being forced to sleep in his car. Unbelievably, students also report getting threatening letters from the university for being late with their tuition payments — apparently the computer system for collecting money works fine.

Consider the case of Vivian Raymond, a nontraditional student there who is trying to earn a college degree while raising two teen-age daughters. After months of waiting for her college loan money, Ms. Raymond obtained a written pledge from the university that she would receive her loan on a certain date. She took that promise to her bank, as a way to prove that she soon would be able to pay what she owed to it. But the promised money did not come through from the university. “As a result,” she says, “I’m in the process of losing my home.”

University system officials say the checks are now in the mail, but that is not enough. They should conduct a thorough review of how this computer adventure with inadequate backup occurred and identify steps to take to prevent it from happening again. And they should start the process with an apology to students.