The U.S. Department of Education on Tuesday announced that it had made long-awaited technical updates that would enable mixed-status families to submit the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. But there’s a catch: The department said it had “uncovered separate issues that still need to be resolved.”
For U.S.-born students whose parents lack a Social Security number, this was good news with an asterisk: a fix requiring additional fixes. The National College Attainment Network said in a blog post that, those unresolved issues aside, the department’s technical update “ends significant frustration” that many mixed-status families have experienced when trying to complete the form. But a half-dozen college counselors told The Chronicle this week that it’s too soon to celebrate. They said that frustration continues for some families that still can’t submit the application despite the apparent fix — and that they continue to encounter difficulties beyond those described in this week’s announcement.
Since the application went live in late December, technical problems with the online form have left mixed-status families stuck, frustrated, and unable to pass Go when attempting to complete it. As The Chronicle recently reported, the long wait for a solution has been “draining and exhausting” for U.S.-born students unable to submit the FAFSA through no fault of their own. Whether your campus enrolls a small or large number students with undocumented parents, the problem is almost certainly affecting some of your accepted applicants, who won’t know what they will have to pay to attend a given college until their federal-aid application goes through. And some of them seem no closer to submitting the form than they were a month ago.
Previously, parents without a Social Security number who started a FAFSA for their children received an error message stating incorrectly that they were “unauthorized to act on behalf of the student since they already have 24-25 FAFSA form,” even if the student hadn’t started the application. And undocumented parents have been unable to contribute to the form even if their child started the FAFSA and invited them to contribute. Parents who have encountered either of those problems, the department’s announcement said, would now be able to complete and submit their section for the application. If everything goes well, that is.
Contributors to the FAFSA who lack a Social Security number still can’t pull in their tax information directly from the Internal Revenue Service, which the form enables U.S. citizens to do. So, undocumented parents must manually enter their financial information, increasing the odds that the application will include mistakes. The department said it would “attempt to retrieve” such parents’ tax information from the IRS and “reprocess the FAFSA, as necessary, to reflect any changes” after a permanent fix is made. But there’s “no estimated timeline” for that fix.
Meanwhile, some FAFSA users, the department said, are getting an error message when they invite someone without a Social Security number to contribute to the form: “This occurs when there is a mismatch of personally identifiable information (PII) that is entered on the invitation compared to the PII attached to the contributor’s StudentAid.gov account.” Typing “Oak Street” here but “Oak St.” there can cause such an error. The department is advising applicants to wait to invite anyone without a Social Security number to contribute to the form. “We are working to resolve this issue,” the department said, “in the coming days.”
If all this sounds tedious, imagine what it’s like for mixed-status families that are especially anxious about the prospect of college and how to pay for it. Families in which parents speak little or no English and work multiple jobs. Families that, for understandable reasons, might distrust the federal government.
Sara Urquidez helps such families all the time. Several days ago, she met with a mixed-status family in Dallas that attempted to complete the FAFSA soon after the Education Department enacted the fix described in its announcement. She confirmed that the information entered was accurate — no PII mismatches. But, after months of trying, they still couldn’t submit the form.
The results are a mixed bag. There are still many families that aren’t able to move forward in this process. So I don’t want to hear that it’s mostly fixed — it’s not fixed yet.
In previous years, parents who aren’t U.S. citizens had to print out a signature page and mail it in to complete the FAFSA. The family Urquidez met with had done this each year for their son, a 2021 high school graduate who’s now in college, with no problems.
But this time around, after trying once more to get through the significantly overhauled process requiring all contributors, including non-citizens, to create a Federal Student Aid account online, the father fretted that he had failed to follow the correct steps in the past — and that his mistake was now preventing both his son and his daughter, a high school senior, from submitting the FAFSA.
“The father was just begging and pleading with me,” Urquidez said. “He was like, ‘We’ve been waiting so long. We’ve been waiting so long. What are we doing wrong?’ And I said, ‘It’s not you. It’s the Department of Ed.’ I still have no answers for them.”
Urquidez is executive director of the Academic Success Program, which provides college advising to 7,000 high-school seniors in Dallas, Houston, and College Station, Tex. Over the last few days, some mixed-status families the organization serves have finally succeeded in submitting the FAFSA. But many others, she said, continue to get unexplained error messages, leaving them locked out. The disappointment left one mother in tears.
“The results are a mixed bag,” Urquidez said. “There are still many families that aren’t able to move forward in this process. So I don’t want to hear that it’s mostly fixed — it’s not fixed yet.”
Elizabeth Herrera agrees. “The fog is clearing up a little bit,” she said, “but it’s still really hard to see the end of the road, which is really scary because we’re already halfway through March.”
Herrera is a co-founder and director of community advancement at Casa Azul de Wilson, a nonprofit that supports the Hispanic community in Wilson, N.C. Over the years, she has helped hundreds of families complete the FAFSA. The temporary workaround the department announced in late February has helped some families that were previously stuck, Herrera said. But other problems are worrying her.
Some parents without Social Security numbers whom she advises can’t get a Federal Student Aid ID, which each contributor needs to complete the FAFSA. “Some of them are struggling to even get a case number to start the required identity-verification process,” she said. “The hard part now is that everyone is at different points on the timeline; everyone’s moving at different speeds. There are so many different steps one has to take.”
Several counselors told The Chronicle that undocumented parents who recently completed the identity-verification process have been told that it will take 25-35 business days for the government to verify their FSA ID accounts. That means those families might be waiting until mid-April to take the next step.
Anna Takahashi, director of college counseling at Eastside College Preparatory School, in East Palo Alto, Calif., has been trying to stay on top of various workarounds and fixes to better advise her many low-income and first-generation students.
“I’m hopeful but also a bit skeptical,” Takahashi wrote in an email to The Chronicle on Wednesday. “Many of my students are done with their section of the FAFSA and waiting for the fixes so their parents can contribute to their FAFSA, and a number of my students are impacted by the other strange glitches. One of the biggest frustrations as a counselor is that the glitches all seem inconsistent. Some students/parents get error messages. Others are sent on an endless loop as they try to enter identifying info. Others appear to have frozen screens, so they log off/restart. So troubleshooting is tricky, as it’s hard to tell if this is a FAFSA issue or if it’s truly user error. A couple of my students have told me their parents tried, without any luck, but they’ll try again later.”
Try again later. Don’t give up. Hang tight.
Counselors are encouraging mixed-status families as best they can as the Education Department acknowledges that some students are still, as its announcement says, “encountering trouble” with the FAFSA: “The department is aware of these issues and is working on resolutions.”
It’s working to fix what, for some of the most vulnerable families of all, remains broken.
