Hidden benefits

Cassandra Murray's mother was 17, unmarried, and already had a baby at home when she got pregnant with Cassandra.

So when Cassandra was born, she became a ward of the state.

She got lucky and a foster family she was placed with in Plymouth adopted her. She didn't find out she was adopted until she was 17, but she dealt with it and graduated from high school and surprised her family by announcing she wanted to go to college. Then she did what a lot of working-class kids do: She went out and got a job and some loans so she could go to college.

Loans don't go away, but jobs do. She worked at The Home Depot, a cellphone store, and then got a perfect job for a college kid as a receptionist at a car dealership. She could do homework between calls, and the boss was fine with that.

Last June, a family member bumped into an old friend who works for the state and that person asked how Cassandra was doing. One thing led to another and the friend explained that because she had been adopted while in state custody, she was entitled to free tuition at any state college or university. This was excellent news because Cassandra was about to enter her third year at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

She called the state and was told to send in all her paperwork and they'd take care of it. And of course she did and of course they didn't.

But Cassandra is nothing if not resilient, so she kept working and waited for the state to do the right thing.

She's still waiting.

"A man from the state called me last month and said, 'We don't have any proof that you were born.' I looked at the phone and I said, 'I can assure you, I was born.' And he said, 'No, no, we don't have a birth certificate.' And I told them I had sent them three copies of my birth certificate," she said.

"He was actually very nice and apologized for the delay and said they hadn't been able to find my birth certificate, and they only have one notary, and she's only there a couple days a week."

Last week, the manager of the car dealership called her in and said that hardly anybody's buying cars these days and he had to let her go. So she's out there looking for another job, and is getting late fees because she hasn't been able to pay her tuition. She'll have to drop out of school soon, the way things are going.

"I asked the state if there was any way they could reimburse me for the money I had to borrow the first two years at UMass, but they said they couldn't because I didn't fill out the paperwork before enrolling," she said. "But I keep coming back to the fact, how was I supposed to know about this? Nobody told me about it. I found out about it by pure chance."

Alison Goodwin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Children and Families, agrees there is no easy way to get the word out to adopted kids that they are entitled to free tuition. There's a website - www.osfa.mass.edu/default.asp?page=aidPrograms - but the agency that takes care of neglected kids isn't exactly swimming in people who can spread the word.

As for helping such students as Cassandra who ran up loans because they didn't know about the tuition waiver, Goodwin said, "There's nothing we can do about that."

Really? Depending on who's getting greased, the government seems to be able to do whatever politicians want it to do.

It took two weeks to get a $700 billion bailout through Congress so a bunch of Wall Street millionaires won't have to drop out of their country clubs.

Cassandra Murray has been waiting six months to get chump change so she won't have to drop out of school.

Is this a great country, or what?

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.