Florida State College at Jacksonville – Downtown Campus — Local services in Jacksonville

I really hate that I have to do this, but in all seriousness, I'm just going to put it plain and simple THIS SCHOOL SUCKS! I am new to the college scene, and I was excited to start my journey here. I really wish I would have looked at the reviews to see what everyone else was going through before I applied. I enrolled in 2017, and it's been nothing but hell since then. I paid my $25 admission fee and signed all of my papers , as well as taking the pert test and then a few days later, they said they haven't received any of my information or the admission fee and they wanted me to start all over. I know it's just $25, but I am a mother and $25 is a lot of money when you are taking care of kids. So they finally told me that they switched over to a new computer database and all of my information was in the old one but they finally transferred it over. But here we are 2018 a year later, and they are asking me to fill out another residency form, and they lost all of the paperwork I previously sent in to enroll so I have to resubmit..again! I was born and raised here in Jacksonville, and I have bills employment history and a mortgage to prove I live here but that doesn't seem to be enough. They have put extra things on my to do list in the my FSCJ portal, and when they realize their mistake they took it off. I had to skip out on fall and spring term because financial aid and admissions couldn't get their stuff together. It's one thing after the next with this school!!! I am really upset with the way I've been treated here. I have been placed on hold several times and hung up on. There is only one person in this school that has helped me more than anybody has, and her name is Miss Christy V. She has been amazing, and I am so thankful for her. The teachers are great, but it's just everything that goes on behind the scenes that was driving me batsh*t crazy . As soon as I can, I am getting the hell out of this school, and heading for the hills.

Update: I have to resubmit a clarification form for financial aid. This will probably take another month or so to process, so it looks like I may have to give up my seat in the classes I chose for the upcoming semester...again! Get it together FSCJ!!!

Update #2: Here we go again.. Luckily, financial aid came through in time for me to start the summer semester. However, I received an email saying they have a hold on my account because of my past due balance? I have a full scholarship, so why are they sending me a bill for...

The school itself is good. However the financial aid department is a mess. I dont know if it's because of their recent problems with the Federal Aid people (they are being investigated), but now their financial aid process is severely backlogged, and you run a good risk of not getting aid in time. They nit-picked every little document, wanted back-up documentation to support the back-up documents of the documentation I previously provided. On more than one occasion they just lost the ones I sent and asked me to submit it again...months later. My husband and I were both planning on attending this semester. Financial Aid Dept rejected documents I submitted, while simultaneously accepting the SAME documentation from my spouse (huh???). One person there would tell me they accept faxed docs while another said they never have and I had to go in person (I still faxed and they were still accepted). I've been through the process before at a previous school and even with the new requirements, this should not have taken this long. This school's FinAid Dept is very disorganized and inconsistent - in desperate need of a streamlined process. As it is now, it is a freaking nightmare of monumental proportions. (Really...this school has invented a new form of psychological torture and if you want to go to school there, you just may have to become the next variable in their experiment). I never did get my aid on time and decided to go to school elsewhere. So word of warning: if you plan to go here in the Fall, file your taxes on Jan 31st and start applying for aid Feb 1st. You will need all that time to get the aid at the rate they are going. And GET THE NAMES OF THE PEOPLE YOU SPEAK WITH THERE. Trust me, you will need it because they seem to have different ways of doing things depending on who you're taking...

After having moved a couple of times during my college career, I attended my fair shared of Florida colleges. This was by far the worst. Don't bother calling, you'll often sit on hold for a God awful amount of time before you can speak to someone. My most recent hold times were 92 minutes in March and 79 minutes in October, which aren't peek months for enrollment or admissions. Also, I attended this school for two semesters successfully with no enrollment issues until my third semester when they would no longer let me register in classes because they "did not have a copy of my high school diploma on file." I asked Admissions to be sure that this is something that's required before registering for any classes, and they confirmed this to be correct. It's mighty convenient that I took classes for two semesters, until FSCJ lost my diploma. Not to mention, the staff is not knowledgeable. There have been times where I called with an admissions or enrollment question in which I was transferred four or five times until someone finally told me that they couldn't answer my question and I should try to call back next week, never mind the fact that I needed this information before the end of the current week as deadlines were at the end of that week. I have poor vision and wear glasses to correct my sight, and there have been test moderators that would refuse to allow me to enter the exam room unless I took my glasses off. Problem being, I can't see the computer screen without them. I've missed more than one exam due to this, and even a final exam. I wouldn't recommend this college to anyone. UNF has plenty of undergrad classes, more so than FSCJ; and their tuition rate is only a dollar higher per credit hour. I eat the three dollars per class just to not have to...