Why a Fafsa Tool’s Continued Outage Hits Community Colleges So Hard

By the time an online tool that helps students complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid was taken down in early March, the users who typically get the most public attention — incoming freshmen going to selective four-year colleges — were largely done applying for aid.

So the Trump administration’s plan to get the Internal Revenue Service’s data-retrieval tool up and running again might seem timely enough. The administration took the tool offline over fraud concerns and has pledged that it will be back online for Fafsa filers in October — when the next aid-application cycle begins — and later this month for borrowers in income-driven-repayment plans. (On Sunday, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education reported on the case of a private investigator in Louisiana who is accused of using the tool illegally in an effort to obtain President Trump’s tax records.)

But the timeline of the Education Department’s fix is “leaving out of the picture the students who are most vulnerable,” says Kelly A. Morrissey, director of financial aid at Mount Wachusett Community College, in Massachusetts. For students at institutions like hers, aid-application season has barely begun, and the tool’s continued outage presents special challenges. Here’s why:

Students make plans later.

For community colleges, the admissions cycle does not end on May 1, the familiar decision day for students attending four-year colleges. Instead, students go through the cycle right until classes begin, which happens at multiple points throughout the year.

That, of course, affects the rhythms of the financial-aid office. Like a lot of community colleges, Des Moines Area Community College, for example, usually sees two spikes in Fafsa filings, says Ean Freels, its financial-aid director. One of those is shortly after the application goes live — during this cycle, that happened in October, because of the introduction of the “Early Fafsa.” The other wave doesn’t come until the summer.

At Anne Arundel Community College, in Maryland, 70 percent of incoming students apply for admission in July and August, says Rich Heath, the financial-aid director. The college encourages students to apply earlier, he says, but many simply don’t have their plans made until closer to the start of classes. And most people don’t complete the famously onerous form until they are at least pretty sure they’re going to college.

“The months of June, July, and August are the heaviest” from a financial-aid standpoint, Mr. Heath says.

New students aren’t the only ones who might not have firm plans until the summer, he adds. And even students who are confident they’ll continue don’t have much incentive to apply for aid early, he says, unless they qualify for Maryland’s grant program or one of the college’s scholarships and must meet the corresponding deadlines.

This means that large numbers of community-college students had yet to apply for aid when the tool was taken offline, and won’t be able to use it.

But they really need the money.

Community-college tuition “isn’t anywhere near as cheap as people probably think it is,” says Helen Faith, director of financial aid and interim dean of enrollment and veterans’ services at Lane Community College, in Oregon.

Nationally, average annual tuition and fees for students who live in a community college’s district was $3,520 in 2016-17, according to the College Board’s “Trends in College Pricing” report.

At Lane, annual tuition and fees are close to $6,000 (the college is on the quarter system). “How many average Americans can simply write a check for $2,000 every three months?” Ms. Faith asks.

Some community-college students do get by without financial aid, working their way through or relying on the support of parents or a partner. At Lane, about 60 percent of students in degree or certificate programs get financial aid. Those students are very needy, Ms. Faith points out. Eighty-three percent of them get federal Pell Grants, for low-income students. Of those recipients, 74 percent get full Pell Grants, meaning that according to the federal government’s formula — which is generally agreed to overstate the money that families have to spare — they can’t pay anything for college.

Helping students apply will be harder.

Like many financial-aid offices, Mount Wachusett’s offers workshops to help students file their Fafsas. Since the data-retrieval tool became available, in 2010, helping students fill out the form has been pretty straightforward, Ms. Morrissey says.

With the tool down, students won’t be able to get very far filling out the form unless they bring their financial paperwork with them.

This year the Fafsa is based on tax data from the “prior-prior year,” a change long sought by student advocates. It’s meant to give students more time to consider their options after finding out what each college will cost. The data-retrieval tool automatically pulls information from the correct year.

But in an ironic twist, now that the tool is down, “prior-prior year” is gumming up the process. Some students have been confused about which year’s information to include on the application, Ms. Morrissey says. And even when they know, they must locate a tax return they’re probably done thinking about. If a student — or the student’s family — doesn’t keep good records, that could be a challenge, she says.

Some students who’ve run into these extra steps blame the college, not the government, Ms. Morrissey says. “They think the red tape is our red tape. They think: Wow, these people are just making it really difficult for me to pay for college.”

Applying for aid is only the first step.

The data-retrieval tool doesn’t just make applying for aid easier. It also makes aid applications more accurate — and, in another irony, is meant to reduce fraud.

Students who file the Fafsa using the data-retrieval tool are less likely to be selected for verification, a process in which they must provide additional documentation. Some colleges don’t award aid to those students selected for verification until they complete that process.

Verification is well understood to be a barrier on the path to college. Last year just 58 percent of aid applicants selected for verification at Mount Wachusett completed the process, Ms. Morrissey says. A minority of those who didn’t finish the process enrolled without aid — perhaps because they qualified only for loans and did not want to borrow. Others simply did not enroll.

Even if students don’t use the data-retrieval tool to apply for aid, they can use it to go through verification. So the tool’s outage makes the mechanics of that process more difficult, too.

Under normal circumstances, the alternative to using the data-retrieval tool for verification is to get a tax transcript from the IRS. That process can be done instantly online, Ms. Faith says, so long as applicants have a credit card or mortgage in their name and are the main holder of a cellphone account, in order to confirm their identity. But many community-college students don’t meet those criteria, she notes.

If all students lack is being the main holder of a cellphone plan, they can request the tax transcript online and get it in the mail — so long as their current address matches the one on the tax return. If they don’t have a mortgage or credit card, though, they have to request the transcript by mail, or else go in person to a local IRS office.

The Education Department offered some relief in late April, allowing colleges for the time being to accept a signed tax return in lieu of a tax transcript. But some colleges have opted not to do so, Ms. Faith has heard from colleagues, because they think it will add to students’ confusion in future years.

Lane will accept the signed tax returns, Ms. Faith says. But she expects to be answering questions about what documentation is permitted years from now, since students often enroll intermittently.

As for this year, any time financial-aid offices have to spend more time processing paperwork, their staffs have less time to spend counseling students. That kind of face-to-face counseling, Ms. Faith says, can be particularly important for community-college students, many of whom are the first in their families to pursue a degree.

Beckie Supiano writes about college affordability, the job market for new graduates, and professional schools, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.