Ashton Spatz, center, a financial aid adviser with the University of Illinois at Chicago, assists Jessena Sanchez, left, and her daughter, Leslie Delve, a sophomore at UIC, during a FAFSA workshop on Feb. 23, 2024, at the Student Financial Aid Office. | Vincent Alban/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Why so many college applicants are worried about being able to afford school.
The federal form used to apply for financial aid, the FAFSA, got an update this year — and so far, it’s been a mess. Many students who need money for college the most have been affected.
Now the US Department of Education is scrambling to smooth out the kinks in its rollout and send out college financial aid information this month for the upcoming school year.
Millions of college applicants who need grants, loans, or work-study funds complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, each year, and states and colleges use the form to determine which students are eligible to get them.
The updated form will eventually make it easier for students to get financial aid, the department said. An additional 610,000 students from low-income backgrounds will receive need-based Pell Grants due to the new configuration — making more than 5.2 million eligible for the maximum Pell Grant award of $7,395 per year.
“The delays are challenging, but colleges will be much better off, too,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told reporters at a roundtable in February. “If you’re a school that has a higher percentage of students with Pell grants, you’re going to get more than you would have ever gotten.”
However, students are experiencing major setbacks in completing the form, with technical roadblocks and application delays since the form was soft-launched in late December. The situation has gotten so challenging that groups who work with students particularly in need of aid say some are rethinking attending college altogether.
“We tell our students that college is possible, regardless of their financial situation. But many of them, and their families, have this notion that there’s no way they can pay tuition. So it is the financial aid that makes it possible for them,” said Heather Wathington, the CEO of iMentor, an organization that helps first-generation students from marginalized communities get into college.
“Not having this process roll out [smoothly] really undermines all the kids that are on the fence or unsure about whether they can go to college,” Wathington said. “This is sending them a message to say ‘you can’t go’ and that’s paralyzing.”
Why was the FAFSA redesigned?
The federal government developed and released a new FAFSA form because the former version, to put it plainly, was a major headache for students and families.
The form hadn’t been updated since its predecessor, the Common Financial Aid Form, was introduced under President Ronald Reagan, according to the Department of Education. It had more than 100 questions and was notoriously complex. Then, in 2019, Congress passed the FUTURE Act, to give the IRS permission to share data with the Department of Education — meaning that students didn’t have to fill out information about family income that the government already had or go to the IRS’s website to transfer their data. The FAFSA Simplification Act, a federal student aid overhaul law passed in 2020, permitted major changes to various FAFSA policies and procedures.
For example, the department’s Federal Student Aid office introduced a new measure to determine a family’s ability to pay for college. Whereas the previous formula asked about the number of family members in college, the new methodology determines family size based on tax returns. Pell Grants will be expanded to more students and eligibility will be determined based on family size and the federal poverty level, according to the Federal Student Aid office.
The department has called the improvements to the application “unprecedented.” The new form is supposed to be simpler since it includes the direct income data exchange with the IRS. The form is also shorter since it tailors the application based on an applicant’s responses. In some cases, it can be as few as 18 questions, according to lawmakers.
But the launch of the form has been plagued with hiccups and inefficiencies, causing massive disruptions to the college application timeline and creating additional roadblocks for the most disadvantaged applicants.
Historically, the FAFSA application had opened on October 1, allowing students to apply for funds, weigh their options, and make their college decisions by May 1. But this time, the new form wasn’t available until December 30, and then only for brief periods — the site repeatedly locked students out due to technical glitches and for maintenance.
The department resolved some of those issues in January, but decided to make a last-minute change to the financial aid calculation to account for inflation and said that it wouldn’t transfer students’ information to colleges until the first half of March, months behind the department’s initial January estimate.
What has the FAFSA chaos meant for students and colleges?
The department’s decision to simplify the form was initially praised. But the delays have met with widespread criticism from lawmakers, students and families, colleges and universities, and others.
As of February 27, more than 3.1 million FAFSA forms have been submitted since late December, representing about 18 percent of the 17 million students who typically submit a FAFSA each year.
Data from the National College Attainment Network’s FAFSA tracker, which collects FAFSA data at local and national levels, has found that through February 23, FAFSA submissions for the class of 2024 were down about 57 percent compared to last year’s graduating class. The tracker also found that the application period has been “disproportionately sluggish” for high schools primarily serving students of color and students from low-income backgrounds.
The issues have been ongoing. The department has kept a long public list of the issues that families have faced amid the rollout, including students who have been unable to save or submit the form, parents who have been unable to access the FAFSA despite starting the application for their child, or parents or students without social security numbers unable to start or reenter forms. A number of the issues have affected parents who are not US citizens or permanent residents. Some of the issues have been resolved with workarounds, while others are still awaiting a fix.
The traditional National College Decision Day for a majority of colleges is May 1, but many schools, including Pennsylvania and Washington state schools, have pushed the enrollment deadline to June 1 while others have suspended their admissions deadlines until they get more information from the Department of Education. Other schools have switched to rolling admissions. Education policy experts have noted that the delays will mostly affect colleges that serve more low-income students and students of color.
Once colleges receive this information later this month, they’ll race to get financial aid packages to families. But since processes have been reworked, they’ll have to run financial aid systems tests and carry out new student aid compliance requirements before they can send awards to students, the department said.
These issues can set off a domino effect. The delayed transfer of FAFSA information to schools delays when colleges can start processing information and ultimately creates a stressful situation in which families must compare financial aid packages and make decisions quickly. Wait lists can be thrown off. Plus, some states and schools provide financial aid on a first-come, first-served basis, a reality that has worried families. The department has, however, assured families that everyone is in the same situation — though some students have been able to submit their applications while others have not.
Others worry that students won’t be able to make decisions until the end of the school year in May and June. For marginalized students who need the support of nonprofit organizations and other assistance, new problems can arise during the summer.
“Our Chicago students are basically out of school by late May and our program ends in June. So if school’s out and kids get these letters, who’s going to help them navigate this process? Will they give up? Will they be so frustrated and not sure what to do and how to enroll in a school?” Wathington said. Each year, iMentor helps more than 1,000 students complete the FAFSA.
“The kids get discouraged, so we’re trying to keep their emotions high and the resilience up so they can get through the process of completing the form,” she said. “And keeping them hopeful.”
What happens next?
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has acknowledged the missteps but says the changes are necessary.
“We’re working with different contractors on the backend and the processing to try to modernize everything. It’s become very frustrating,” Cardona told reporters. Part of the delay in getting the data out is in November his team learned that they had to make an adjustment for inflation.
“Our projections for what students could get became impacted by inflation,” Cardona said. “We learned that that would result in $1.8 billion in the pockets of students if we used the new numbers. The formula and back-end stuff was set up, so we had to make a decision: Do we go with the numbers and leave $1.8 billion on the table or do we redo all that work we did because we want to get the $1.8 billion out? That’s a no-brainer. It doesn’t make it any easier, but we made that decision consciously.”
Last month the department announced that it was launching a “College Support Strategy” to send teams of federal financial aid experts to “lower-resourced colleges” to provide consultations as the schools assembled aid packages. While many colleges have already pushed back their deadlines for students to accept or decline admissions offers, the department is urging more schools to give students more flexibility and time to make their enrollment decisions.
In the first half of this month, the department will begin sending batches of FAFSA information to colleges and state agencies. The department estimates that it will be able to transfer the majority of the information within weeks after that.
“The delays are challenging. We’re going to do everything we can to get through these next couple months with our colleges. We’re sending them staff. We’re going to get through it and these colleges will be much better off. That’s more dollars for schools. At the end of the day, this is opening the door so much to higher education leveling the playing field.”
Though practitioners believe there will be hope for future classes of students, there’s worry that the delays will cause big problems for certain institutions and the current class of students that can’t be overlooked.
“My guess is students will decide to go to the schools that they know are most affordable, said Wathington. “Here in New York, they’re likely to go to a SUNY but if they don’t hear from SUNY, and they’ve applied to CUNY and they know CUNY is much cheaper, they may just decide to go to CUNY school.” This is a problem for institutions concerned about their yield, she said.
For some students, access will continue to be a problem.
“We don’t have the number of kids we want entering college and enrolling as it is,” Wathington said. “And with these rollbacks on race-conscious admissions, and now having the carpet swept out from under you in terms of aid and access, you’re just closing the door to kids who wouldn’t traditionally go into higher education.”
She added, “I want to be hopeful for next year, that it ends up being all the things that Secretary Cardona is expecting, but I think for this year, there will be a deep impact on access. There are kids who are going to be harmed by the fact that it didn’t happen for them. They’re caught in between a system that was and a system that’s changing.”