A634.7.4.RB - Shuck, Allison

Throughout my career as a Financial Aid Counselor, I have witnessed far too many unethical decisions made by students and/or colleagues. However, the one instance that stands out the most actually happened when I was working for Everest University.

Now it is important to note that Everest University is a for profit university; and as a result of that, there is high completion between the admissions counselors for increased student enrollment. From what I can recall the counselors actually received bonuses for high enrollment numbers. Needless to say, this began to create a problem. Why, because counselors would fight over who took what student and whose student were seen by financial aid.

And on top of that, headquarters began to implement the IGNITE program. The program required the admissions office to run through a serious of steps with the student before transferring him/her to the financial aid office; where financial aid would could continue the IGNITE requirements. Between admissions and financial aid, students would spend roughly an hour, hour and a half going through the IGNITE process. More often than not, students would become overwhelmed / restless and would decide to leave before seeing financial aid.  Well… this became a problem for admissions because the student would not count toward enrollment unless he/she went through the entire IGNITE Process.

Here is where the unethical decisions were made. Many admissions counselors started bribing students into finishing the IGNITE process (seeing financial aid). One counselor even offered to drive a student home, which is against company policy. And, when upper management was informed of this, he looked the other way because he too was counting on the enrollment numbers; if his staff did not get high enrollment numbers, he would look bad. I can even recall a time when an admissions counselor tried to bribe me; he offered to buy me lunch in exchange for squeezing his student in-between appointments. Although I really wanted a free lunch, I reported the incident to my supervisor and told the admissions counselor that I did not have enough time to see his student. As you can see the whole situation was chaotic and as a result of the chaos, I decided to leave Everest to work for Embry Riddle.