Post Secondary students getting cooked by the UCP (Student Loan Change)
The AB government recently changed the rules around eligibility for student loans with little warning and announcement. Total incomes of parents are now considered for dependent students.
For me, this is quite bad because my parents aren't able to provide tuition support. I know a lot of people in similar situations where their parents (validly imo) didn't anticipate that they would need to help because of how reliable student loans have been, and can't just bring up $12k on a whim to help out even if they wanted to.
For reference, this was previously only used for assessing the need for grants (parental/spousal income used to be an optional section).
It's causing some friends to consider taking leaves of absence for the upcoming year, or seriously consider dropping out. It would have been great if there were more announcements, or even notices on the student loan application that this would be the case to allow us to plan better. It's hard enough to plan 2 months in advance as a student when you suddenly realize student loans won't help you out, but its even worse when the announcement is so quiet that people are realizing it when they get their response in the days before school starts.
While I do know that this used to be the policy pre 2012, it's really hard to plan for this when they announce and deploy this policy with little warning (I think they quietly announced it a couple months ago).
Federal loans depend on eligibility that the provincial government determines, so that won't help us either.
I just feel really lost and wish they'd announced this at least a year in advance. Thanks for listening to my mix of an announcement/rant. Sorry if the flair is wrong, I don't know if it falls more into politics or a discussion.