Such change was only acknowledged when freshmen students discovered that the expected scholarship was not deposited after the due date, June 24, and publicized the issue online and made inquiries to the Office of Student Affairs (OSA).
Regarding the change of policy, the school explains that it was a necessary cutback in order to secure the need-based financial aid scholarship and the freshman scholarship.
“It is a social demand and governmental guideline that universities provide equal educational opportunities by securing a certain proportion of the scholarship for students who are in financial need,” explained Hong Youn-ah, the manager of Scholarship & Welfare team of OSA. “At the same time, we need to invest more on the freshman scholarship to attract talented students.”
The school also emphasized that it has been constantly increasing the size of scholarship while decreasing or freezing tuition.
“Although academic scholarship Excellence 2 is abolished, the number of freshmen students who receive scholarships has increased, as the size of freshman scholarship grew,” Hong said.
However, students were annoyed by the way the school changed the policy without giving proper notice.
“Since there was no official notice, we only found out about the change on the day we were supposed to receive scholarship,” claimed a freshman who wishes to remain anonymous. “Scholarship is an integral part of student welfare that concerns many of us. The school should have undergone an adequate communication process with students when making such decisions.”
In fact, there was no change in the online notice of scholarship section even until June 23. One sentence explaining that the class of 2015 would no longer benefit from the academic scholarship Excellence 2 was only added the day after as the controversy was inflamed. The school responded that they deleted the description of the scholarship from the materials distributed at freshmen orientation.
Accordingly, the Student Government Association (SGA) asked for OSA’s explanation on the reason of the abolition and the date of its first notification. However, according to Son Sol, the student president, SGA has been waiting for an answer for more than a week. The SGA will be announcing its plans for further response as soon as they receive an answer.
Kim Hye-won
kimhyewon@ewhain.net