Buck Ready to Streamline Financial Aid

Buck Ready to Streamline Financial Aid

BY MICHAEL CINELLI
Rice News Staff
October 28, 1999

When he turned 50, Carl Buck left his position as a student aid administrator at a New Jersey university and moved to a ski resort in Park City, Utah.

After 25 years at schools in California, Utah and New Jersey, Buck decided it was time “to take a break.” He finished a financial aid video, “30 Tips in 30 Minutes,” a primer on how to pay for college, to help finance his life-altering decision and became a mountain ski instructor while continuing to serve as a financial aid consultant to institutions of higher education.

“It was time to take time for myself,” he said. “If people can afford it, and I could, they should do it. Faculty take sabbaticals. In a way, this was my sabbatical. It just happened to be as a ski instructor. But it allowed me to gain insights on what I wanted to do.”

After four years of meeting people from all over the world, Buck left the snow-capped mountains of Utah and returned to his student aid career at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside.

He was recruited from that school earlier this year and assumed the duties of Rice’s financial aid director Oct. 1.

Buck is now immersed in making the transition from a state-supported institution to a private research university. He is meeting with a variety of administrators, faculty and staff who “are starting to let me know how the needs of Rice are different from those of a major public university.”

One of the major challenges Buck and his financial aid staff face is streamlining the decision-making process in order to distribute initial financial aid award announcements to students in a more timely manner.

He never presumes that perspective students and their families have all the information they need on student aid.

Even after students enroll at a university, things change and opportunities open up that can have an impact on how a family pays for a college degree, he said.

“At Wisconsin, the vice president for student services allowed me to make presentations about financial aid to a number of classes,” Buck said. “Afterward, more than 100 students decided to apply for student aid, which covered grants, employment opportunities and loans. Many of these students had self-determined that they were not qualified for financial aid.

“But some of their parents had lost jobs since their son or daughter had enrolled or there had been divorces. A variety of things had happened that had an impact on the students’ status.”

Buck plans on working with Rice administrators, particularly with Vice President for Enrollment Ann Wright, to fashion a postenrollment program similar to the one he implemented at Wisconsin.

But he wants to reach out to students before they have even applied to Rice so the university can compete even more aggressively against peer institutions such as Harvard and Stanford.

“One of my goals is to provide online financial aid awards to all students,” Buck said. “I also would like to develop an interactive Web site for prospective students and their families, offering preliminary needs analysis and immediate aid offer.”