About 8,000 UC Berkeley students had their Middle Class Scholarship awards mistakenly reduced by the Financial Aid and Scholarships Office on Oct. 5. Students noticed charges of up to several hundred dollars on their CalCentral billing statements before awards were corrected on Oct. 7.
Students were first notified of an error in their Middle Class Scholarship, or MCS, in an email Oct. 6. Looking at CalCentral, students found new charges on their accounts correlating to award reductions.
According to campus spokesperson Adam Ratliff, the errors occurred when campus adjusted MCS awards to account for each student’s enrollment after the census date, when campus examines dropped or added classes to determine final enrollment levels.
“Every semester, we are required to update Middle Class Scholarship (MCS) awards to align them with students’ actual enrollment as of the census date,” Ratliff said in an email. “This semester during our MCS census adjustments a coding error caused incorrect MCS award reductions for many recipients.”
Out of 10,120 students who received MCS this semester, 7,890 were impacted, according to Ratliff. UC Berkeley student Scott Wei said he received an email notification about a change to his financial aid package on the morning of Oct. 6, alerting him that his MCS award was reduced from $159 to $121.
He paid the $38 charge associated with the accidental reduction before it was restored Oct. 7, but Wei said that he had yet to receive a refund for the payment.
“I just started using library access, so immediately my intuition was that, ‘Oh my God, your library freaking charged me?’ But once I did a little more digging, it turned out to be the reduction of Middle Class Scholarship,” Wei said. “So, right now, I’m not sure whether that $38 is going to be refunded to me, or is it just going to be applied for the next semester? You know, it feels like the system just swallowed my money and didn’t spit it back out.”
UC Berkeley student Isaac Zepeda also said he had his MCS award reduced — by more than $700. He first found out about the reduction from a Reddit post instead of the email campus sent out. Following instructions he received from an automated response when calling the financial aid office, he did not pay the charge posted to his account and received his full award after campus corrected the error.
However, a new $75 late fee for waiving UC Berkeley’s Student Health Insurance Plan appeared after his MCS was corrected.
Issues with the Middle Class Scholarship are not new. Students in Fall 2023 faced difficulties and delays with disbursement of the MCS, with some students receiving it after tuition was due.
Funds for the MCS program were also cut in California’s state budget for the 2026-27 school year. Previously covering up to 35% of eligible students’ remaining cost of attendance after other aid, it currently covers only 17.5% of the remaining cost of attendance.
Any students still experiencing issues with payments related to the reduction “should contact Cal Student Central as soon as possible,” Ratliff said in an email.