Financial-aid awards land with the thud of finality. Any student peering at a screen full of jargon and financial figures might wonder how to even go about asking a college to reconsider its offer.
A new online tool called SwiftStudent was designed to help them do that. The free service, available to any student receiving federal aid, leads users through the ins and outs of requesting aid adjustments. The website provides appeal-letter templates for various situations. Say, a student loses housing. Or a medical crisis hits. Or a parent gets laid off. Many families are experiencing such hardships because of the Covid-19 crisis.
The Seldin/Haring-Smith Foundation created the tool with help from students, financial-aid officers, and college counselors, as well as from experts at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, the National College Attainment Network, and the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice, among several other organizations. The website lists a series of “How do I …” prompts, such as “Ask for financial aid to cover my dependent-care costs” and “Ask for financial aid to cover expenses associated with my disability.”
SwiftStudent’s stated purpose: To help students assess their eligibility for filing an appeal, determine the supporting documents they need, and then write and submit an appeal letter. (The tool’s creators say that students’ data will not be sold or shared with third parties.)
The tool, built by a company called FormSwift, is meant to empower students by informing them that appeals are even possible, said Abigail Seldin, chief executive and co-founder of the Seldin/Haring-Smith Foundation. “Most students believe that what you get offered by your college is the end of the story.”
Seldin isn’t new to the financial-aid realm. In 2012 she helped start College Abacus, a once-controversial and now-defunct online tool that gave consumers estimates of the net price they would pay at specific colleges.
In an interview with The Chronicle on Tuesday, Seldin described why she thinks SwiftStudent is necessary — especially right now.
In a nutshell, what do the creators of this tool hope to accomplish?
We are trying to be the translator, to make it easier for students and financial-aid officers to communicate. We don’t have an agenda beyond making this user friendly and accurate.
There’s a lot of expert advice about how to negotiate your financial-aid package. But that advice is typically targeted at middle-class students attending private colleges. SwiftStudent works for those students, too. But, fundamentally, we wanted to create a site with expert-vetted language that was clearly linked to the regulations. This is what experts specifically say is how you might consider interacting with your college to get an answer about your eligibility and what’s available for you.
How did the idea arise?
I was sitting in a GAO briefing about its report on student parents’ access to federal aid in September on Capitol Hill. As I was listening, the thing that stuck out to me was the finding that two-thirds of all colleges had not shared information with students about the dependent-care allowance. In a world where we’ve got five million student parents, that just seemed like a huge gap.
For the record, the Government Accountability Office’s finding was that student parents might be eligible for more loans to cover child care, but that two-thirds of colleges’ websites reviewed didn’t mention that.
So I was dwelling on that and thinking about how hard it is for students to advocate for themselves. When I mentor students, whether they’re community-college students or students at elite schools, no one ever asks me for help with their homework. It’s always, “Can you help me write a letter to the financial-aid office?” Or, “Can you help me write a letter to my professor?”
It occurred to me that there might be a way to create a form letter for students seeking help paying for child care. Then that blossomed into lots of other scenarios.
For those outside the financial-aid world, what’s a “special circumstances” appeal? And why might it be important during the Covid-19 crisis?
The vast majority of students have no idea that they can appeal their financial-aid offer. As it happens, if your financial circumstances change, or if you feel your circumstances aren’t adequately represented by the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, then you can file a special-circumstances appeal and request that your college’s financial-aid office consider other information and exercise professional judgment to change your financial-aid offer.
There are a variety of circumstances that are generally accepted across all colleges. But professional judgment does mean that the situation varies. So the process can seem a little mysterious to students.
This tool is going live just as a giant chunk of Cares Act funding is set to provide aid to colleges for students affected by the pandemic.
We are heartened that colleges will have access to $6 billion that they can distribute to their students directly. That’s not going to fill all of the needs our students experience, but the recognition that colleges need emergency aid — and need it now — is deeply meaningful.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
In terms of how that money is going to get to students, institutions are still figuring out how they’re going to allocate it. There is some guidance that colleges could exercise a professional-judgment process to allocate this, but that remains to be seen.
What’s most important is that students be prepared to advocate for themselves and to request aid. Fortunately, aid offices may be in a position where there’s money available to meet students where they are.
You could envision how almost every student who submitted their Fafsa before February 15, which most students did, would need to file a special-circumstances appeal, because their Fafsas won’t reflect the new Covid-19 economy and the knock-on effects that their families have encountered.
To create this tool, you held a series of focus-group discussions. Many included financial-aid officers. What did you hear from them?
They expressed a deep desire to help their students — and a frustration with sometimes not being able to do so because of the way that appeal letters come in.
It’s small stuff, in many cases. Students will submit letters that don’t have their full names on them, or that don’t have a student ID on them. Financial-aid officers don’t have any real way to track down that student.
Some basic things we’ve been able to pre-program, like “include your school email address, and check it every day.” Or “include your full name as it appears on your Fafsa.” There’s some entry-level information that’s often a serious barrier to appeal evaluations.
Another frustration that came out in the discussions is that financial-aid officers often have to go a few rounds with a student to even understand what their situation is. Students will be best served if, when they write their letter, they already have a sense of the documentation they’re able to provide with it. Including that information upfront, with a succinct explanation of the situation in the letter, can help financial-aid officers make a judgment.
Aid officers also reflected on the time they’ll save by being able to evaluate letters more quickly, with the info they need. The process right now is really difficult, and staffing levels are not necessarily conducive to custom appeals with five conversations with a student. They just don’t have the capacity.
Did anyone throw up their arms and say, “Wait a minute, I don’t want an avalanche of frivolous appeals?”
No one really raised that, and I kept waiting for someone to highlight that concern. A couple of folks did raise the question of how we would communicate that we’re not helping students somehow beat the process.
What we’ve said is that we’re training students how to submit the information, and then colleges are evaluating that. It’s not just based on the letters they write but on the substantiating information they provide. If you don’t have substantiating documents, this tool can’t really help you.
Success for SwiftStudent is not actually that students fill out the forms. We have guidance throughout our site that students should look at their financial-aid office’s site first. They should see if they can find a form they need. They should reach out to their financial-aid offices to see if they have a process they would like them to do. To me, success is that students understand that this process exists, and it’s a process they can participate in.
Some experts say that successful appeals are pretty rare. And SwiftStudent includes disclaimers that using this tool doesn’t guarantee that you will get more aid. Still, do you worry that the tool’s mere existence might imply that students will see their appeals granted if they follow this step-by-step process?
Students are contending with so much right now, especially those who need more financial aid. We don’t want to be a source of stress or distress. We wanted to be very forthright with students that this is not a guarantee.
At the same time, it’s important to give students a bit of credit. We highlight on the site that someone who files an appeal must “wait for your school to accept or reject your request.” When we tested this with students, they understood that it’s an application and not a guarantee in any way.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
