Justin Chase Brown took last week off. It was spring break at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where he serves as director of scholarships and financial aid. “Just trying to have a little calm,” he told The Chronicle last Friday, “before the storm gets even worse.”
The storm is the disruption resulting from the problematic rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, which went live in late December, about three months later than usual. After a rocky first month defined by glitches and unexplained errors that have hindered many applicants, the U.S. Department of Education announced in late January that it wouldn’t start sending processed federal-aid forms to colleges until the first half of March, pushing back the financial-aid timeline even further.
The department early last week did send a limited number of processed forms, known as Institutional Student Information Records, or ISIRs, to colleges throughout the nation. Most institutions depend on those electronic documents to generate financial-aid offers for students, a step that keeps the big enrollment machine humming. But as of last Friday, Nebraska had received fewer than 10. By mid-March in a typical year, the university would have about 25,000. A dozen other colleges last week said that they had received as few as two; a couple reported that they had none at all.
“It’s all still moving too slowly,” Brown said.
Then, on Monday, things sped up a bit. Nebraska received more than 900 ISIRs, and some larger universities in the Big Ten got 1,000 to 4,000 that day. Several other institutions told The Chronicle that they had received hundreds or thousands of ISIRs — more than some had been expecting to see by midweek. And an official with the Education Department said during a webinar on Monday that it would deliver “hundreds of thousands” of ISIRs over the next week as it ramps up its output.
That’s good news after months of frustrating delays, a sign that the stalled financial-aid process can get moving again soon. But even as ISIRs are finally starting to flow to colleges, some financial-aid officials say they’re worried about what they’re seeing. Several institutions have reported higher-than-usual ISIR rejection rates of 20 to 25 percent; on some of those campuses, the rejection rate was in the single digits during the previous aid cycle.
Typically, an ISIR rejection happens when the department determines that a FAFSA contains incorrect or incomplete information that needs to be corrected. Common errors include misspelled names, wrong Social Security numbers, and skipped questions. Officials at several institutions said this week that missing student and parent signatures accounted for most of the rejections.
As of Tuesday morning, the University of Texas at Arlington had received 7,664 ISIRs and had seen a 28-percent rejection rate, according to a series of emails shared among members of the Coalition of State University Aid Administrators. As of early this week, another message said, the University of Georgia had received nearly 7,000 ISIRs, 3,382 of which were matched with students in its system; of the latter, 1,243 — or 37 percent — had a rejected ISIR.
But guess what? The six million federal-aid applicants who’ve submitted a FAFSA so far still aren’t able to correct their applications; the department said recently that they will be able do so “later in March.” In short, there’s much more work ahead, for colleges as well as for many applicants. In a normal cycle, colleges, high-school counselors, and families would have several weeks, at least, to sort through questions, confusion, and the mistake-correcting phase of the FAFSA process. But there’s precious little time between now and May 1, the traditional deposit deadline at many colleges, although some have extended that deadline.
This is progress, just not quite as much as expected from the initial ‘first half of March’ announcements.
Brown said on Tuesday that he was encouraged to see processed federal-aid forms arriving at Nebraska, but he wasn’t celebrating. “This is progress,” he said, “just not quite as much as expected from the initial ‘first half of March’ announcements.”
The department has put colleges well behind schedule. And just because it is starting to hand over the required tools for the job doesn’t mean that financial-aid offices can finish tomorrow, or next week, or, some fear, even before the end of April.
“One of my big worries,” Brown said, “is that people will think everything is fine once we get ISIRs. But that’s just the beginning.”
If you don’t work in a financial-aid or enrollment office, the term ISIR (pronounced “icer”) might not register. But for those who toil in the trenches of those high-pressure professions, an ISIR is a familiar name for the bundle of data that enables colleges to create, or “package,” aid offers for each accepted student who qualifies.
Here’s how it works. First, a federal-aid applicant submits the FAFSA, which collects financial information and other personal details used to calculate the Student Aid Index, or SAI, an eligibility index number that colleges use to determine how much federal aid a student would get when enrolling . The government’s Central Processing System, or CPS, also matches FAFSA information against several federal databases, including the National Student Loan Data System, and checks for inconsistencies and mistakes on the form.
After all the processing is done, the CPS produces one electronic “output document” for applicants and another for colleges. Students and families get a Student Aid Report showing their SAI. And each institution that an applicant designated on the FAFSA gets an ISIR for that student. And the latter includes a slew of technical details.
“Colleges get a ton more information on an ISIR than you would get just from a FAFSA,” said Jill Desjean, senior policy analyst at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, known as NASFAA. “You can see the actual math, all the interim calculations that went into determining the student’s SAI. It includes all these indicators, these little flags that say, ‘This student should be able to get this, this student doesn’t qualify for that.’ Because you can see the student’s loan-borrowing history, the ISIR will tell the college, ‘Hey, you can’t give the student a full loan this year because they’re up against their aggregate maximum.’ Or it will indicate that even though the student appears to be eligible for a Pell Grant, you can’t give them one because they reached their lifetime eligibility.”
Greg Mitton, director of financial aid at Muhlenberg College, in Pennsylvania, tried to remain patient this winter while waiting for ISIRs, but he found it difficult to keep telling his staff and students’ families to just sit tight. Along the way, Muhlenberg embraced a strategy similar to those that several other colleges adopted: It encouraged prospective students to submit a copy of their FAFSA confirmation page, with their SAI, to the college. Mitton’s staff used that information to create a provisional financial-aid offer, which included non-need-based scholarships as well as a need-based aid total (including institutional, state, and federal grants).
“We told them that unless they made drastic errors on the FAFSA,” Mitton said, “we would guarantee the integrity of that financial-aid offer.” About 750 families completed that step and received an early estimate of what it would cost to attend.
Still, Muhlenberg’s official offers couldn’t go out until ISIRs finally arrived. As of early Monday afternoon, the college hadn’t received any at all. “I was frustrated,” Mitton said. “Frustrated for Muhlenberg. Frustrated for students. Frustrated for parents.”
But later, Laura Rasmussen, director of financial-aid operations, shared some welcome news. “It’s happening,” she told him.
One batch of ISIRs arrived on Monday afternoon. Another came in overnight. By Tuesday morning, Muhlenberg had more than 1,000 ISIRs, for an applicant pool of about 5,000 students. “Hopefully, by next week,” Mitton said, “we’re delivering aid offers to students.”
Just because your financial-aid office received a big batch of ISIRs doesn’t mean that it’s ready to roll into the packaging phase right away. That’s because the software colleges rely on to process ISIRs and convert applicant data into sound aid offers requires serious preparation, testing, and retesting. When the department’s SAI formula changes, as it did recently, software vendors must make technical adjustments so that things run smoothly on the back end.
“Having these first ISIRs helps us know, in this entirely new process, what they look like and how they’ll load into our system, but we can’t act on them yet,” said Brown, at Nebraska. “It takes at least two weeks to test and make sure everything is working.”
Expectations are going to be really high for colleges. It’s just going to be, I think, a really rough late spring and summer here.
Many colleges distribute aid on a first-come-first-served basis. But some financial-aid officials said they had been grappling with what to do this year. Some said they would wait until they had ISIRs for most or nearly all prospective students. “In order to be equitable to the students who filed in January versus two or three weeks ago, as well as those who couldn’t get into the FAFSA because their parents don’t have Social Security numbers,” Brown said, “we’re going to assess and evaluate all these ISIRs together.” Other aid directors said they planned to wait until they had ISIRs from half or three-quarters of their accepted students. One said her college would start “as soon as possible.”
Brown said his university’s software provider recently had a fix, or “patch,” fail. That, in turn, has delayed the loading of ISIRs into the live version of the system his staff uses to assemble aid offers. Given those delays, he said, the best-case scenario is that his institution will get its offers out the door by the end of April: “I don’t know how many colleges will even be able to package by May 1.”
In a recent announcement, the department said that most colleges would probably receive no more than 1,500 ISIRs per day, though some large institutions might get 25,000: “Once we have ramped up delivery, we anticipate it will take about two additional weeks to process all applications that have already been submitted.”
On Tuesday, Nebraska received more than 1,500 ISIRs. By Wednesday afternoon, it had nearly 6,000 in all. It was a sign, perhaps, that the pace of delivery was quickening.
Brown said he had come to feel more confident in the Education Department’s ability to deliver processed FAFSAs than he did at the beginning of the week. And he was cautiously optimistic about the department’s ability to make the FAFSA accessible to all students. Nearly three months after the new application arrived, some mixed-status families still can’t submit the form due to unresolved technical problems.
Despite some encouraging signs this week, Brown said, the ever-tightening timeline for colleges has put many financial-aid staffs in a difficult position. “The public will expect us to be able to take immediate action on these ISIRs,” he said. “Expectations are going to be really high for colleges. It’s just going to be, I think, a really rough late spring and summer here. The Department of Education has been given a lot of grace, and I’m not sure that colleges will be given that same grace.”
As colleges scramble to load ISIRs and issue aid offers, a crucial question will continue to loom over everything: How many prospective and returning students will file a FAFSA this year?
“With only six million FAFSAs submitted to date, we’re still really far behind past years,” said Desjean, at NASFAA. “The department can catch up on its backlog, but then we need all the people who haven’t yet done a FAFSA to complete one. They’ve been hearing that it doesn’t work, that it’s complicated, and that they won’t be able to do it — all the things that people used to say about the FAFSA that FAFSA simplification was supposed to fix.”
The storm is far from over. And it’s about to intensify.
