Applications for Aid Soar at Community Colleges : Education: Increased fees and new eligibility laws have Ventura County students rushing to file for financial assistance.

Ventura County’s community colleges are seeing a rush of loan and grant applications this week, as new eligibility rules, fee hikes, and a lingering recession sent students scurrying to the campuses’ financial aid offices, officials said Thursday.

The overload of aid applications complicated the more frantic than usual rush of fall registration at Moorpark, Oxnard and Ventura colleges, which reduced their number of offered courses to compensate for budget cuts.

Financial aid applications at all three colleges soared over the levels they were at this time last year. Officials estimated that students might file 50% more financial aid applications than last year.

“It’s mind-boggling,” said Lois Denardo, the financial aid officer at Oxnard College, where 1,483 applications had been filed as of Thursday afternoon--already 120 more than were filed in the whole previous academic year. “We’re running around like chickens without heads.”

Nancy Davis, the financial aid officer at Ventura College, speculated that enrollment at the college will continue to slide throughout the fall as loan applications backlog.

Due to budget constraints, Davis’ staff was cut this spring to one part-time worker and four full-time employees who are responsible for processing about 2,800 loan applications.

“The students will start dropping out because they can’t continue to finance their education” without financial aid, she said.

Some, like Irma Flug of Santa Paula, said they will have to postpone their education a little longer.

Flug, 44 and a mother of two, now works full time as a nurse’s aide while taking one or two night classes a semester. She had hoped to enroll as a full-time nursing student this fall, she said. But when she went to process her loan applications, she found she could not get any money until January.

“I kind of made my decision about two weeks ago, so I guess I waited too long,” she said.

In previous years, however, officials said, students like Flug would have received their loan money mid-semester, if not earlier.

But this fall, the rise in applications coincided with an increase in fees, from $10 per unit to $13 per unit, or about $90 a year for a full-time student. Outside jobs were harder to come by, forcing more students to borrow money for their schooling.

And finally, federal law changed so that applicants no longer must figure in the value of the home they live in when applying for grants. This allowed many middle-income students who previously were ineligible for aid to receive government assistance.

College officials at Moorpark and Ventura colleges speculated that financial hardship combined with a lack of classes at the two campuses might be turning students away even before classes started.

Budget cuts forced college officials earlier this year to order 300 classes cut from the fall schedules. Such basic classes as math and English filled early on--at Ventura College, the sections closed after the first day of early registration for continuing students last May, officials said.

Frustration levels seemed the highest at Ventura College and Moorpark College, where, despite an enrollment drop as high as 8.9% at the Ventura campus, registration counselors still turned students away from the most popular, overcrowded classes.

The meager selection left students like Brady Daniels with few options. Daniels, 18, of the Santa Rosa Valley, chose to begin his college career at Moorpark after a last minute decision this summer not to go to a military academy in New Mexico. Registering late left him with few choices, he said.

“I’ve tried a little bit, but there’s nothing open at all,” Daniels grumbled Wednesday afternoon, sitting in a line that snaked around the corner of the Moorpark College registration office.

Instead of the math, English and history schedule he’d hoped to take, Daniels said, it looked instead like he would end up with German, a couple of environmental science courses and a music appreciation class.

Daniels’ situation, though extreme, was hardly unique, college officials said. “Most students have a closed class on their schedule some place,” said Donna Knapton, a registration counselor at Oxnard College.

Unlike the county’s two other campuses, fall registration at Oxnard College has actually risen 4% over this time last year, officials said. The smallest community college in the county only saw its classes cut by .6% this fall, according to the registrar’s office.

By contrast, Ventura College lost 10.7% of its classes in budget cuts, and enrollment is down 8.9% from this time last year, officials there said. Moorpark College is offering 4.5% less class sections than last fall, and mail-in enrollment this fall was down 4.9% from the same time last year, according to official estimates.

Registration counselors at the two colleges said the drop in enrollment mystified them, especially during a recession. “When the economy is sluggish, enrollment at community colleges is generally up because people are casting about for new careers,” said Joan Halk, the registrar at Ventura College.

Some officials proposed that the drop in enrollment might be directly due to the corresponding drop in available classes.

“The students come in and they’re not getting the classes they want,” said David Robles, the head of Ventura College’s counseling department. “Some students get real frustrated and walk away and say the hell with it.”