Freshmen really don't know what's going on. It's not their fault, mind you, they are just young, impressionable and probably drunk on Natural Light. We all know this, and most of us try to help the occasional lost freshman find Murdoch Hall or set up a Facebook.com account.
But not everyone is quite so altruistic.
The wicked tricksters of the ASU financial aid department seem to think it's funny to watch freshmen flail in confusion. That, or total ineptitude on the part of administrators, must be the reason for the most recent snafu involving freshmen.
It breaks down like this. According to the ASU scholarship Web site, freshmen students are required to take 15 credit hours a semester in order to keep any merit-based scholarships they may have. Administrators at the Barrett Honors College, which many scholarship students attend, agree that the requirement is 15 hours. However, the bigwigs at the financial aid office are saying that the old requirement of 12 hours still stands.
Freshmen are stuck in the middle with a crummy choice before them. They can either take 15 hours and possibly be overworked in their hectic first year, or they can take a more comfortable 12 hours and endanger their scholarships.
It may not seem like much to take 15 hours. After all, 15 credits a semester gives 120 credits over four years, which is the minimum requirement for graduation. But for many during their freshman year, school is an afterthought. Moving into a dorm with all the freedom it entails, becoming an adult and forming new relationships can all trump boring-old-school during students' first year at ASU.
Although ASU is trying to shed its party school reputation, it should not be the goal of the University to graduate a bunch of socially maladjusted freaks. Freshman year should be a time of exploration and freedom before the full responsibility of college life comes crashing down.
The mix-up in financial aid may inadvertently pose a solution that allows freshmen to enjoy themselves and be on track to graduate.
Freshmen should have to take at least 12 hours their first semester and 15 during second semester. This way, freshmen have a semester to adjust to college under a light workload and finish their year only three credits behind.
Those credits can be easily fit in somewhere over the next three years.
In any case, ASU needs to shape up pronto and announce a single policy to freshmen before the confusion gets any worse.
The poor little fellas can only take so much.
