Bad Glacier

I really dislike the people who designed the Need Access Application. I don’t see how they could have come up with a less user-friendly site design or a worse layout for the actual application. You’d think they’d keep all the loan-related questions together, rather than asking slight variations of “how much did you borrow to pay for school?” on each of five different pages.

And they charge $15 per school for the privilege of applying for need-based financial aid? Hmm, this seems oddly familiar… From the “About Access Group” page (emphasis added):

The history and growth of Access Group revolve around one basic idea: make affordable financing more accessible to graduate students.

This idea first took shape as the “Law Assured Access Program.” Under the direction of the Law School Admission Council (LSAC), this program initially provided financial access to ABA-approved law schools, offering two federally-guaranteed educational loans. (This is now known as the Federal Stafford Loan program.)

I knew it!

Screw law, we should go into the “monopolize an aspect of graduate education” business like LSAC and Access Group. (Yes, I realize both LSAC and Access Group are nonprofit, but with the amount of money we have to give them, I can’t imagine they’re spending money wisely.)

Bonus points to UVa for being the only school I’ve applied to that doesn’t use the Need Access form. Sure, they have their own form, so information doesn’t automatically transfer to other schools’ applications, but at least I don’t have to pay $15 to send it out.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 9th, 2005 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Applying to Law School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.