Colleges Reported Near Crisis in Financial Aid : Education: Study contends that county’s three campuses may be losing up to 5,000 potential students because cuts have left the office staffs unable to keep up with demand.

Thousands of Ventura County residents who want to enroll in community colleges are failing to do so, unaware that financial aid is available or because they cannot get school loans processed in time, a new study has found.

The Ventura County Community College District may be losing as many as 5,000 such potential students a year--nearly a fifth of the combined student bodies of Moorpark, Oxnard and Ventura colleges--because funding shortages have left financial aid offices severely understaffed and unable to keep up with demands for help, the report says.

Two consecutive years of tuition increases have exacerbated the problem, officials say, sending a flood of students already enrolled at the colleges to financial aid offices seeking help.

“Our campuses need to declare an emergency and re-prioritize staffing,” Trustee Timothy Hirschberg said. “We are strangling students’ educational dreams with red tape and bureaucracy.”

The trend is particularly alarming because the district already faces the prospect of losing $1.3 million in state funding next year due to declining enrollment, district officials say.

According to the report, the district is “near a crisis in the delivery of financial aid” and should nearly quadruple its campus-based financial aid staff of 11 employees. The document was written by the district’s three financial aid officers.

At the very least, Trustee Pete Tafoya said, each campus should add one or two financial aid employees immediately.

Moorpark College President Jim Walker said he wishes that he could hire more financial aid employees.

“The problem is we’re just inundated,” he said. “Every time the student fees go up, the financial aid applications just skyrocket, and we don’t have the staff to handle it. We’ve been decimated, and it’s hard to get our priorities in such a way that we can afford to hire.”

Figures show that financial aid applications at Moorpark College have been increasing steadily in recent years, Walker said. Between the past school year and the 1993-94 year, financial applications increased from slightly less than 1,500 to almost 2,000, he said. Student fees also rose from $10 per unit to $13 per unit in the same period. The financial aid office staff of three remained the same.

“With only three people over here doing financial aid, we get way behind,” he said. “We’re unable to process forms fast enough and students don’t enroll, they leave. We’d love to add just one person. It would make us happy.”

The situation at Ventura College, where there are five full- and part-time employees, is similar to that of Moorpark, officials said.

Oxnard College is struggling even more than Moorpark and Ventura, the report said, employing less than a quarter of the staff needed.

A recent day at Oxnard College’s financial aid office was typically hectic, with small clusters of students crowding the main desk seeking assistance. Behind the counter, one staff employee and a student worker struggled to keep up with the demand.

“They’re just lacking in people, that’s all,” said Oxnard College student Terrie Farr, 30, a single mother of an 8-year-old daughter.

Farr is supporting her family with the help of welfare, and is putting herself through school with federal and state grant programs.

“They need about four more people in here,” she said. “There’s so many questions people ask and there’s not enough staff to answer them all.”

Farr said her worst wait in recent memory was on a rainy Thursday several weeks ago when grant checks arrived; Farr waited in the cold and the rain for two hours to get her money.

“And that was after cutting in line,” she said.

Monica Robles, 23, another Oxnard College student who receives financial aid, agreed that the problem is not the quality of the employees, but the quantity.

“They’re knowledgeable about financial aid, but often there’s a crowd of people around the desk and, after a while waiting, the people get irritated,” she said.

Jobs in the financial aid offices are among the most stressful on the campuses, said Leanne Colvin, president of the union for non-teaching staff.

Financial aid employees “are extremely overworked,” Colvin said. “Some of them are working a lot of overtime; some have given up vacation time to get the work done.

“With the student fees going up and the economy going bad, a lot of people are turning to financial aid to go to school,” she said. “It’s just getting harder and harder for the staff to keep up.”