Luis Vergara felt a surge of hope when he saw the news. On April 30, the U.S. Department of Education announced changes to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) that, the agency said, would enable students whose parents lack a Social Security number to complete the form.
Vergara, a high-school senior in Houston, was born in the United States. So he’s entitled to federal aid even though his mother, a Mexican immigrant, lacks U.S. citizenship. He had been attempting to finish the FAFSA since early February, but, like many students from mixed-status families, he kept encountering problems with the online application that prevented him from completing it.
For there yet to be a meaningful, working solution is infuriating.
At first, the apparent fix seemed promising. James Kvaal, the under secretary of education, said during a press call on April 30 that the changes to the FAFSA system would “substantially streamline” the application process for mixed-status families; the department said in its announcement that it was committed to ensuring that students from all backgrounds “can equitably access the FAFSA.” Later, people posted celebratory messages on X. News outlets reported that the form was finally “fixed” for mixed-status families stuck in FAFSA limbo through no fault of their own.
But was it true? After reading the department’s detailed announcement online, Vergara tried once again to invite his mother to contribute to the application. But once again a technical issue with the form kept him from doing so. Vergara tried repeatedly. His college adviser did her best to troubleshoot. Nevertheless, he remained stuck.
“The FAFSA website was saying that there was now a solution to my problem,” he said. “But I still couldn’t do anything.”
Students throughout the nation have found themselves in the same frustrating position, confronting the same frustrating fact: The FAFSA had not been fixed, at least not completely, for everyone. Certainly not in a way that enables all mixed-status families to complete the form.
The revamped FAFSA, which was supposed to simplify the federal-aid process, continues to stoke alarm, anger, and distrust among an especially vulnerable group of applicants and parents, some of whom still have no financial-aid offers in hand. As the school year nears its end, some college counselors are seeing some seniors rethinking their plans to attend college because the application still isn’t working for them. And advocates for low-income and first-generation students fear a longer-term consequence: that this year’s FAFSA fiasco will erode marginalized communities’ faith in higher education and the federal government.
Vergara, a science buff who describes learning calculus as a painful but rewarding experience, is ranked second in his class of 120. He hopes to attend the University of Texas at Austin this fall. But in mid-May, just a few days before graduation, he still didn’t know what it would cost, or how much he would have to borrow. And he wouldn’t know all that until he somehow managed to complete the FAFSA.
His next step was uncertain. At first, Vergara got an error message when he tried to invite his mother to contribute to the form. “Now, the invite button disappears,” he said. “I can’t even try to invite her. It’s a weird situation.”
Vergara had heard classmates comparing financial-aid offers. And it stung. So he distracted himself by hanging with his little sister, writing in a journal, and battling nefarious machines in Horizon Zero Dawn, a video game. Still, as June neared, his incomplete FAFSA loomed over him.
“I’m kinda into stoicism,” he said. “But it’s demoralizing.”
The FAFSA crisis has put mixed-status families through the wringer. When the application became available late last year, parents without a Social Security number were locked out of the system, unable to complete their portion of the form. Then, in late February, the Education Department announced a temporary fix enabling students from mixed-status families to obtain a filing date time-stamp needed for early financial-aid deadlines set by some colleges, state-aid programs, and private scholarship providers. But students who completed the nine-step workaround still had an incomplete FAFSA that didn’t give colleges actionable information — or provide families with an estimate of their college costs. And the process didn’t work for everyone.
In mid-March, the department announced that it had made additional technical updates that would enable mixed-status families to complete the FAFSA. But there was a catch: The agency also said that it had “uncovered separate issues that still need to be resolved.” Many families continued to encounter snags, making it all but impossible for them to complete the application.
From Day 1, undocumented parents have struggled to create a Federal Student Aid ID, known as an FSA ID, which every contributor needs to access the application. The cumbersome identity-verification process stymied many families. The changes the department announced at the end of April, though, were meant to remove that obstacle, enabling families to “immediately access” the form.
But one thing soon became clear to many college counselors: The latest fix, though widely welcomed, didn’t work for some families. Nor did it resolve many common snags that have kept families from completing the FAFSA throughout the spring. Those include:
- When students invite a parent with an FSA ID to contribute to the application, those invitations sometimes don’t show up in the parent’s account, shutting them out of the form; in some cases, the link contributors receive doesn’t work. And some parents who’ve tried to delete their account and start over have been unable to do so.
- Some families who start a FAFSA get a message stating incorrectly that they’ve already submitted the form.
Some users have encountered submit buttons that are “unclickable”; others have seen the button vanish.
After completing a FAFSA, students get a message that includes their Student Aid Index, or SAI — a number used to determine how much federal aid an applicant should get. But some applicants — including those who initially received a -1500 SAI, indicating that they qualify for the full federal Pell Grant, of $7,395 for the 2024-25 academic year —- have later received a message stating that the system “cannot calculate” an SAI for them, even though their applications contain no apparent errors or discrepancies.
Meanwhile, colleges aren’t seeing an SAI come through on their end for some applicants. Without that number, institutions can’t create an official aid offer that includes federal and state need-based aid. Some colleges are sending students financial-aid offers with no need-based assistance listed.
“We shouldn’t pretend that the FAFSA has been fixed for all these families and that they will get through the system with no problems,” said Bryce McKibben, senior director of policy and advocacy at the Hope Center at Temple University, who, in a previous role as a congressional staffer, helped craft the legislation mandating the FAFSA revamp.
Some college counselors who work with low-income and first-generation students have noticed something that strikes them as an especially cruel fact of the FAFSA crisis: Generally, applicants who completed the workaround introduced in February are encountering the greatest difficulties.
The clock is running out, some kids have largely given up, and anything we’re doing with FAFSA feels like a farce at this point, because so many students don’t have financial-aid offers.
“Many students who were trying to be proactive and do things early are being affected by these glitches,” said Sara Urquidez, executive director of the Academic Success Program, which provides college advising to 7,000 high-school seniors in Dallas, Houston, and College Station, Tex. “The clock is running out, some kids have largely given up, and anything we’re doing with FAFSA feels like a farce at this point, because so many students don’t have financial-aid offers.”
Though a few of the recent FAFSA workarounds have helped some families, they haven’t helped others at all.
“We’re seeing some progress, but it is far from what I would call enough,” Teresa Steinkamp, director of advising at the Scholarship Foundation of St. Louis, said in early May. Her faith in the department had plummeted: “For there yet to be a meaningful, working solution is infuriating.”
Steinkamp, known as “the FAFSA lady” among the families she advises, described each announced resolution, each supposed fix, as “entirely insufficient” for mixed-status families in need of help. She has seen the emotional toll that FAFSA difficulties have taken on some students and parents. Telling them over and over to “try again,” she said, only exacerbated that toll: “The depths of frustration and the fear of not being able to go to school in the fall is palpable. You can see it on their faces, you can hear it in their words.”
Talk with students stranded by the FAFSA, and you’ll hear exasperation, confusion, anger, and doubt. What often comes through most vividly, though, is their exhaustion.
When Camila Del Moral, a high-school senior in Dallas, first submitted her signature for the FAFSA, it didn’t stick. So she had to do it again. Then her mother, who’s not a U.S. citizen, completed the identity-verification process. But when Del Moral invited her to contribute to the form, nothing happened. The teenager and her college adviser checked several times to make sure all the personal information on the FAFSA exactly matched the information in the contributor-invitation section. They found nothing amiss: no discrepancies in how the home address was listed, no spaces after names and emails, or any of the other tiny issues known to cause snags.
They made sure that de Moral’s mother hadn’t put her Individual Taxpayer Identification Number in the box where citizens enter their Social Security number. They deleted her mother as a contributor and then added her again. That didn’t work. The family’s saga, which began in February, was ongoing as of mid-May, just a few days before her graduation.
Del Moral, who aspires to become a pediatric nurse, has logged into her mother’s FAFSA account again and again, hoping to find that it’s finally linked up with her own. Each time she sees that it’s not, she said, “it makes me angry, because I feel like I’m not as valued as the other people. I want to go to college like the others. I want to experience things like the others. I feel like I’m not worthy enough for the Department of Education to get my financial aid.”
Her classmate Nataly Ramirez was stuck, too. She planned to major in media studies at the University of North Texas, in Denton, and then pursue a career in the film industry. But her mother and stepfather, who are raising four children, have little savings, she said. So she would need a lot of aid to enroll at UNT. But the same form that could unlock those crucial resources was also a barrier.
When Ramirez logged into her FAFSA to make corrections and add her mother’s signature in early spring, an error message instructed her to try again later. For weeks she kept trying to complete the task, which, if the application were working properly, would be simple. Then, in mid-April, she and her college adviser found that they couldn’t even access the application: When they logged in, everything was just … frozen. The same thing happened when they logged into the mother’s side of the form.
Ramirez called FAFSA support, but that didn’t help. In late April, she tried FAFSA support’s online chat. A customer-service representative told her to clear her computer’s search history, as well as the cache and cookies, and to try an incognito browser. None of that worked. After learning that Ramirez’s mother lacked a Social Security number, the rep explained that there wasn’t a workaround just yet: “We are advising to try again at a later time.”
“But the issue still is that we cannot click on the actual FAFSA form at all,” Ramirez replied, according to the transcript she saved. “I’ve been trying for a month now.”
“You will need to give it some time to reset itself,” the rep said. “The form does have this trouble sometimes.”
“Do you have an estimated time of when this could be fixed? I keep receiving emails from FAFSA that I need to log in and make corrections.”
“Unfortunately, I do not. I would recommend looking into filling out a paper copy if worse comes to worst.”
Worse had already come to worst, though, for Ramirez and many other low-income students whose lives the FAFSA debacle has complicated and whose futures it has draped in doubt. She didn’t want to submit the paper form, for which there was no processing timeline (the department finally announced on May 10 that it would process paper FAFSAs in late June). To be considered for all forms of aid at UNT, she has to submit a completed FAFSA by May 31. Even if that happens, she worries she’ll get less aid than she would’ve received if she hadn’t experienced a long delay.
Recently, Ramirez and her mother had a chat. “She was like, ‘If this isn’t fixed, I don’t think you’re going to be able to go,’ because she doesn’t make that much money.” But later, her mother told her they would find a way to pay for the first year and then try to submit the FAFSA for 2025-26.
Ramirez wanted to feel hopeful again. She wanted her FAFSA to unfreeze and go through. She wanted to walk across a stage in a teal cap and gown on a spring afternoon, knowing for sure that she could afford to chase her dream.
What would all the FAFSA foul-ups of 2024 add up to?
For many lucky families, perhaps nothing more than a fleeting headache, a few bumps on the road to higher education. But for the most vulnerable applicants and parents, for those who are already on the fence about college, for those who are deeply anxious about the cost and value of it all, for those who feel marginalized each day, the problems with the federal-aid form might feel like a 10-story billboard that says, You’re Not Welcome Here.
“This is just another reminder that the whole system of higher education was not built to serve students like them,” said Korynn Schooley, vice president for college access at Achieve Atlanta, a nonprofit group that advises low-income and first-generation applicants. “That message just gets reiterated every time there’s an announcement that now this is fixed, or here’s a nine-step workaround. We’re constantly going back to families and saying ‘Here, try this,’ calling on them to put energy toward it. And then we feel like we’re deflating their hopes and patience every time.”
Schooley and her colleagues have been keeping up with the constant wave of official FAFSA fixes and workarounds posted by the Education Department, as well as the many unofficial ones circulating on social media. Sometimes, she said, a particular strategy works, and sometimes, it doesn’t.
Like many college-access advocates, Schooley has been watching national FAFSA-completion numbers inch up over the last several weeks. After a major lag in the number of students applying for her organization’s need-based scholarships, on the heels of months of FAFSA delays, she was encouraged to see those numbers rising sharply in May. “We’re feeling much better about the numbers,” she said. “But the quality or the assurance behind those numbers is very different from years past. They’re precarious numbers.”
Just because a given student manages to complete a FAFSA doesn’t guarantee that they will enroll. And there’s little time left in the calendar for advising families, especially those still waiting for financial-aid offers.
“Usually, you need a couple different touch points with a family,” Schooley said. But, in her experience, many families need a half-dozen or more chats with an adviser as they’re sorting through financial-aid offers and trying to make sense of their options. “For many, I think it’ll just feel too risky, after getting this information in May or June, to then sort of jump into college.”
Rocio Zamora shares that worry. “These are students who have experienced uncertainty their whole life,” she said, “and now the FAFSA is adding another layer.”
Zamora, who leads the college-access program at Herbert Hoover High School in San Diego, said that some mixed-status families’ difficulties completing the FAFSA have sparked a troubling misperception. “We’ve heard from some parents in the community who say, ‘Yeah, I know my son or daughter can’t apply for financial aid because I’m undocumented,’” she said. “The application is covertly giving them that message, and those myths spread quickly.” Parent ambassadors from the school have been trying to dispel that myth in conversations with their neighbors.
A deeper concern: The revamped FAFSA process, which for the first time requires undocumented parents to verify their identity online, has sparked anxiety among many mixed-status families. “As a mixed-status student, you have the fear that one day you’ll be separated from your family,” Zamora said. “Now, you’re having to out your parents on the application. That family dynamic is impacting students’ mental health. There’s an emotional toll for families.”
McKibben, at the Hope Center, fears that students’ frustrations with the FAFSA will have a lasting impact on underserved communities. “I think it’s going to start playing out in polls on the perceptions of higher education and financial aid,” he said. “If somebody had a really negative experience and then told a couple of their friends, ‘Don’t bother with the FAFSA,’ those students are going to be skeptical about the whole process. I’m extremely, extremely worried about what this will mean longer term.”
Joanna Moreno Dimas, a high-school senior in Bolingbrook, Ill., outside Chicago, spent much of the spring trying to link her part of the FAFSA to her mother’s. In the end, she determined that a small discrepancy in how each of them had typed the family’s home address in their account settings (“Drive” versus “Dr”) was the apparent cause of the problem. She fixed it and completed the form.
Such snags might seem almost ridiculously random. For some students from mixed-status families, however, those snags haven’t felt random at all; they have felt like more of the same. Dimas, an aspiring elementary-school teacher, has often seen people in stores staring disapprovingly at her and her parents when they converse in Spanish. She has heard the disrespectful way that some people speak to her mother at the hotel where she supervises the cleaning staff. And her family’s long, frustrating experience with the federal-aid process reminded her of those moments.
Dimas said that the FAFSA — especially the arduous identity-verification process that undocumented parents must complete — made her sad for her mother and father, who have been living and working in the United States for nearly two decades without a Social Security number. “They don’t have this number, which made things harder for us,” she said. “So it just created more stress for them. It’s this feeling of constantly being overlooked — diminished.”
Some folks get everything they need; others must make do or go without. Emily Ramirez learned this early on.
Growing up in Dallas, Ramirez knew that her parents, who aren’t U.S. citizens, had little money and no health insurance. The family visited low-cost dental clinics, where, she recalls, appointments were hard to get and the quality of care was spotty. Once, her mother lived with severe pain in her jaw for more than a year because the surgery was too expensive. Ramirez, the oldest of four, called around to find a surgeon whose services were affordable. Those experiences inspired her plan to become a dentist.
Ramirez finished her part of the FAFSA on January 9. The teenager, who intended to enroll at UT-Austin, wanted to do everything as quickly as possible on the way to becoming the first in her family to finish high school.
But the FAFSA kept slowing her down. Helping her father get through the identity-verification process was a time-consuming chore, during which many things went amiss. She spent hours on the phone waiting to speak with agents at the federal-aid office, and many of her calls went unanswered. Later, she received a message stating that her FAFSA was missing a signature even though her college advisers had checked her application carefully before she submitted it. After that was resolved, Ramirez submitted the FAFSA again only to get an email stating that the system “cannot calculate” her SAI. But the message didn’t say why, and her calls to the FAFSA support line went nowhere.
“I would just be waiting for somebody to pick up and tell me the same thing over and over again,” Ramirez said, “like, ‘We don’t know when we’re going to fix this glitch,’ or, ‘We don’t know what’s going on with your FAFSA.’”
The Education Department recently announced that it’s investigating reports of FAFSAs with a blank SAI field, which, it said, affected “a very small number” of more than 9.7 million processed forms. The department said that the issue might require some applicants to make a correction, and that it would send students and contributors instructions for doing so. College counselors and financial-aid officers say that the missing-SAI issue is affecting all kinds of students — not just those from mixed-status families.
Still, while contending with months of unnerving FAFSA obstacles, Ramirez often felt that she was being punished because her parents aren’t U.S. citizens. While many applicants were completing the FAFSA with ease, mixed-status families had to make do and go without. “FAFSA has made not only me, but my family, feel really out of place in this country, even more so,” she said. “It just really made me feel horrible as a Hispanic student.”
Finally, on Friday, May 10, Ramirez and her college advisers tried a new tack: They deleted her father as a contributor and then invited her mother to contribute to the form instead. And that enabled Ramirez to complete the FAFSA — four months after she started. Afterward, she got an official confirmation email and an SAI.
“The tension in that room, it disappeared,” Ramirez said. “We all sighed.”
That Sunday, Ramirez’s family celebrated Mother’s Day over a meal of ham and tortas de chorizo at a ranch outside Dallas. With her FAFSA done, she could enjoy the moment, she said, “without having that voice or ringing in my head.”
But the very next day, Ramirez received some disconcerting news: Though UT-Austin had received her processed FAFSA from the government, she said, the file didn’t include an SAI, which meant that the institution still couldn’t send her a completed financial-aid offer.
Had the FAFSA been fixed? No, not for her. At least not yet. Right away, she scheduled a May 21 Zoom chat with one of the university’s financial-aid officers to discuss her latest federal-aid snag.
Ramirez, once again, was stuck.
“I thought we were done,” she said.
