Rob Reddy knew things were about to unravel. Late last year, as everyone and their dog was waiting for the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, to finally become available, he saw exactly what college officials everywhere saw: “It was very apparent that this thing was gonna go bad and there were going to be delays.”
Then, just a few days into the FAFSA’s rocky rollout, Reddy, interim vice president for enrollment management at Saint Louis University, reached a conclusion: “It was time for Plan B, and we knew that we could take matters into our own hands.”
So SLU created its own institutional aid application that replicates the FAFSA’s questions. Families who complete the optional form will receive a “comprehensive” aid award listing institutional grants and scholarships, plus any state and federal aid that the university determines that a student is eligible for. And applicants who submit the form promptly will get their offers by the end of February, weeks before colleges expect to begin receiving processed FAFSAs.
Federal Student Aid
The government will ease a major burden for students and colleges, but it offered no timeline for fixing problems preventing families from submitting the federal-aid form.
SLU’s experimental workaround is just one example of how higher education is responding to major delays in the federal-aid process this year. Since the U.S. Department of Education announced that it wouldn’t start sending data from completed FAFSAs to colleges until the “first half of March,” many institutions have been assessing how, or if, to adjust their financial-aid processes and timelines — and what to tell anxious families who are waiting for answers.
As The Chronicle reported in a recent article, technical problems with the FAFSA continue to stymie families. More than six weeks after it went live, parents without a Social Security number still have no way to contribute to or submit the online form. Though the Education Department says it’s working on the issue, a fix doesn’t seem imminent.
Meanwhile, Education Secretary Miguel A. Cardona announced last week that colleges will soon start receiving test versions of Institutional Student Information Records, or ISIRs, to prepare their systems for assembling aid offers; he confirmed in a call with reporters on Monday that this would happen by February 16. Still, continuing uncertainty about when, exactly, colleges will finally receive real ISIRs is complicating what might seem like simple questions, such as whether to push back deposit deadlines — a move that most colleges haven’t made, at least not yet.
With a chaotic spring looming, plenty of college officials say they’re cautiously optimistic that FAFSA data will soon start flowing to institutions. But some say they’re skeptical, too. As one enrollment official put it: “The Department of Education has not shown that they can follow through on a promised deadline yet.”
A winter of FAFSA uncertainty is taking its toll on everyone with a stake in the admissions process. In early January, Reddy, at SLU, met with several high-school counselors from the St. Louis area. “I sat around a table with them and asked what they were feeling and what their families were feeling,” he said. “Their overwhelming sense of anxiety just kind of hit me like a tidal wave.”
Such conversations convinced him that SLU shouldn’t just sit back and wait for the Education Department to process batches of FAFSAs. And the Jesuit institution’s senior leaders agreed with his assessment. “We needed to live out our mission,” Reddy said, “and to support families who are in a moment of deep concern and stress.”
SLU notified students and parents that its new form was live on February 9. As of midnight on Monday, less than three days later, 270 families had completed it. (The university declined to say how many applicants it had accepted to date; it received nearly 13,000 applications for the fall of 2022 and admitted 85 percent of those students, per federal data.)
Reddy said SLU won’t require students to submit the federal-aid form to get institutional aid, but it is reminding applicants that they still must submit the FAFSA in order to obtain federal grants and loans. And he said he’s confident that SLU can provide all families who complete the new institutional aid form with a “solid SAI,” or Student Aid Index, a number that institutions use to determine how much federal aid each applicant is eligible for.
We are deeply concerned about first-generation, low-income students.
That number will be only as solid as the data a family enters, of course. So SLU is urging families to complete its form carefully — and to use their tax returns to do so. Reddy said that SLU would stand behind all aid offers based on the information submitted via the institutional form unless there are major errors — like an income discrepancy of $15,000 or more. In such cases, SLU would contact the family and try to work something out.
SLU’s plan carries risks, Reddy said: “There are technical risks: We want to make sure it’s safe and secure, and that it does what it’s supposed to do — we don’t want errors.” And introducing a new form might confuse some applicants: “Our communications have to be clear and consistent, so we need to be proactively engaging families.”
Getting financial-aid offers out earlier than other colleges could give SLU a competitive advantage during an especially uncertain spring, which Reddy acknowledges. “Yes, we’re in a competitive environment,” he said, “but that certainly was not the driving force behind this initiative. We did this because it’s the right thing to do.”
More institutions, especially smaller private colleges, might soon take a similar approach. John Carroll University, a Jesuit institution near Cleveland, announced in early February that families can submit their financial information directly to the university, which will extend an aid estimate well before it expects to receive ISIRs — and commit to honoring that estimate. The university has invited applicants who received a FAFSA confirmation with an SAI to share that number with the university. (“Cost estimates powered by your FAFSA,” its announcement says, “will be guaranteed.”)
And the institution has offered to work with families who submitted the FAFSA but didn’t receive an SAI — as well as those who’ve hit snags preventing them from filing the federal-aid form — to provide them a full estimate.
Mercy University, in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., announced on Monday that it would soon unveil its own “financial-aid package estimator tool,” designed to give families a quick, accurate estimate of their final aid package, which the institution would then “validate” after receiving the FAFSA data.
Though some college counselors worry that a flurry of newfangled financial-aid forms could end up confusing families, Carolyn Blair welcomes the strategy. “I would applaud any college that’s doing something to reach out to families to help them understand what’s going on,” said Blair, director of college counseling at Clayton High School, near St. Louis. “With these types of solutions, colleges definitely need to overcommunicate and not penalize students and parents if they don’t happen to see that extra thing that they’ve added to the process.”
Elsewhere, you can find variations on the same theme: Colleges are switching things up to try and get around the bottleneck of unprocessed FAFSAs. But some institutions are in a much better position to do so than others.
A few hundred colleges require a detailed financial-aid form called the CSS Profile in addition to the FAFSA. Many of those colleges send aid estimates to admitted students ahead of formal aid offers. Now, some of those institutions, including Drexel University, in Philadelphia, are telling families that they will go ahead and guarantee their estimates instead of waiting for FAFSA data to arrive.
“We are deeply concerned about first-generation, low-income students,” said Dawn Medley, senior vice president for enrollment management at Drexel, where more than a quarter of students are eligible for federal Pell Grants. “We’re asking, How can we ease their burden?”
Medley said she’s confident that the university can come very close to estimating a student’s full financial-aid package based on the CSS Profile: “We have made the commitment to every one of our incoming new students that if we get it wrong, we’re going to make it right.” So, if Drexel calculates that an applicant is eligible for a $4,000 Pell Grant, but later sees that, based on the SAI, they qualify for $3,500, the university would make up the difference.
This is not like an electric switch, where you flip it and the lights turn on.
Beloit College, in Wisconsin, announced on Monday that it, too, will honor the aid estimates it has been sending to admitted applicants. “Even after we receive students’ official FAFSA results later this spring, they will not be asked to pay any more than what we had offered based on the [CSS] Profile,” Betsy Henkel, Beloit’s director of financial aid, said in a written statement. “If a student ultimately qualifies for less federal or state aid than we estimated, we will make up the difference with institutional grants.”
Such moves, which could benefit students and institutions alike, are an attempt to spin confusion into certainty, to kick-start a still-stalled federal-aid process. How quickly that process finally gets rolling will determine whether colleges can get aid offers out the door. Some financial-aid officials told The Chronicle that they doubt they will be able to get all aid offers out before mid-April, which would leave applicants with little time to compare offers.
“Colleges are anxiously waiting for test records from the Department of Education so they can stress-test their information systems,” said Justin Draeger, president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “Whether they’re system-ready will depend on how robust those test ISIRs are and whether colleges have a good number of them. Like, are they given just a few, or do they start getting dozens and dozens? And the next question is how long it takes those ISIRs to fully download to the institutions, because this is not like an electric switch, where you flip it and the lights turn on. Those are the huge factors that will ultimately determine whether aid offers are out in the first week in April, the last week in April, or somewhere in between.”
As some colleges are trying to improvise their way through FAFSA delays, many officials have been considering whether to adjust their enrollment timelines. So far, a few dozen colleges have pushed back their traditional May 1 deposit deadline to either May 15 or June 1, according to one publicly available list. Those include the entire California State University system, Oregon State University, Lewis & Clark College, and Virginia Tech. The University of California system recently announced that it would give applicants until May 15 (except for out-of-state and international students admitted to UC-Berkeley).
But many other institutions are waiting to see whether ISIRs do, in fact, start flowing to colleges in mid-March. Some enrollment and financial-aid leaders told The Chronicle that they don’t want to tell admitted applicants now that they will have until May 15, only to tell them later that, due to further FAFSA delays, that they will have until June 1.
Holly Kirkpatrick, assistant vice president for financial aid at Arcadia University, in Glenside, Pa., said she and her colleagues will continue to assess the possibility of moving the May 1 deposit deadline. “There are multiple layers of individuals on campuses that might be involved in a decision like that,” she said. “For me, there’s uncertainty about if June 1 is even the right date when we just don’t know how the next few months are going to shake out. So much has already been moved, so many things have been announced, and then the Department of Education hasn’t followed through. Things are constantly changing in this landscape, and we want to provide some consistency.”
The National Association for College Admission Counseling, known as NACAC, is among 10 education associations that have urged colleges to push back their deposit deadlines. Yet Angel Pérez, NACAC’s chief executive, said such a move can prove more complicated than it might seem. “We think it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “And at the same time, institutions don’t want to do it over and over and over again. It’s not a switch you can just flip. One reason institutions are proceeding with caution is because they need to understand the entire mechanics of changing a deadline, to really get a good understanding of, if we do this, what are the greater implications?”
We keep telling people to not give up and to be patient.
Changing one part of the enrollment timeline typically requires changing another. Mercy, which announced this week that it will extend its May 1 deadline to June 1, also said it would bump back admitted-student days, originally scheduled for March and early April, to mid-to-late April.
“The deposit deadline impacts our timing for orientation and for housing deadlines,” said one senior enrollment official at a flagship university on the East Coast who said he wasn’t permitted to speak publicly about institutional strategies. “We want to make sure we’re not advantaging students who really don’t have to wait for aid.”
The trick, in most any enrollment decision, is to balance various institutional objectives while serving applicants who are in different circumstances. “I need to ensure that I can accurately hit my enrollment goal while also being fair to students,” the official said. “I want to give students enough time, but only about 20 percent of my population will need to wait for the information in that full aid package. So I have every intention of being flexible with the students who need it. But I’m also not going to open the window — and potentially not hit our enrollment target — for the 80 percent of students trying to decide between here and other institutions based on tuition-discounting.”
In the end, extending deposit deadlines might not matter much to many low-income applicants, given that some states and colleges distribute financial aid on a first-come, first-served basis, some college-access experts say. “May 1, June 1 — it doesn’t matter because many students still can’t complete the FAFSA, and by the time they can, all that money will be gone,” said Sara Urquidez, executive director of the Academic Success Program, which provides college advising to about 7,000 high-school seniors in Houston, Dallas, and College Station, Tex. “And moving back a deadline to June doesn’t mean that kids are going to have support they need to navigate all this.”
Many enrollment and financial-aid officials agree that, regardless of whether they change deposit deadlines, institutions must provide flexibility to families who need it, especially those who haven’t been able to submit the FAFSA yet through no fault of their own. “We’ve got to approach each family on an individual basis,” said Kirkpatrick, at Arcadia, “and make sure that students who warrant special attention, who need more time, are getting it.”
Enrollment and financial-aid officials deal in metrics — application totals, net-tuition revenue, SAI. But behind each number there’s an applicant. And right now, many of them feel frustrated, anxious, and stuck.
Since last fall, Arcadia has been offering monthly financial-aid webinars for families, providing updates on the FAFSA, and inviting students and parents to ask questions anonymously. Kirkpatrick’s staff has also been offering one-on-one appointments in two-hour blocks three days a week. Though there haven’t been many takers so far, Arcadia has been hearing concerns from some families who’ve hit snags when trying to complete and submit the FAFSA.
“There’s so much uncertainty out there — people feel panicked about making a decision without all the information available,” Kirkpatrick said. “Some families, they filed the form and think that they did everything right, but they’re unsure. We are trying to reassure them that if something doesn’t look accurate, we will let them know. For families worried about missing out on financial aid, we are telling them that we will evaluate their application regardless of when we receive it. We keep telling people to not give up and to be patient.”
But that, as everyone playing the FAFSA waiting game knows, is much easier said than done.
