The U.S. Department of Education on Tuesday announced a temporary workaround for students who’ve been unable to submit the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, because one or more of their parents lack a Social Security number. But the nine-step process will stoke more confusion and frustration, some college-access experts predict. And mixed-status families must keep waiting until early March, at the soonest, for a permanent solution to the problem that has launched 1,000 headaches.
Nearly two months after the revamped FAFSA became available, parents without a Social Security number still can’t contribute to or submit their portion of the online form. The problem has left many students who are U.S. citizens — and entitled to federal aid — incapable of completing the application just because they come from a mixed-status family. That barrier is demoralizing, as The Chronicle reported in a recent article: “It just kind of seems unfair,” Diana Almaraz, a high-school senior in Forth Worth, Tex., whose mother is undocumented, said of her family’s inability to submit the FAFSA at the time. “Like the government doesn’t care about us, like their priorities are somewhere else.”
The Education Department said this week that it will resolve the technical issues preventing parents with a Social Security number from completing the FAFSA “in the first half of March,” after which students will be able to submit a completed form. Until then, the new workaround is meant to help applicants who need to record a FAFSA submission date in order to meet early financial-aid deadlines set by colleges, state-aid programs, and private-scholarship providers. Enabling students to log a submission date is especially important in states, such as Texas, where public institutions distribute aid on a first-come-first-served basis.
But that workaround is an elaborate chore. That chore involves submitting an incomplete FAFSA that won’t give colleges actionable information — or give applicants an immediate sense of what they can expect to pay for college — until all nine steps are finally completed down the line. Essentially, the fix just gets you a time stamp.
Step 1 instructs students to make sure that they and their parent or parents create a Federal Student Aid ID, which each contributor needs to access the form. But so far this winter many undocumented parents haven’t been able to create an FSA ID. The department says in its instructions for the workaround that improvements to the FSA ID process will “ensure a faster and smoother experience” by the end of February for parents lacking a Social Security number.
Step 5 requires applicants to enter income and tax information for their undocumented parents, including their adjusted gross income and income taxes paid. “You may need a copy of their 2022 federal tax return to complete this section,” the instructions say. Applicants then must submit the form without the signature of a contributor who doesn’t have a Social Security number. “A pop-up window will warn you that the form is missing your contributor’s consent,” the department’s instructions for the workaround say, “but simply select ‘Submit’ again to move through that message.”
The important thing to know here is this: After submitting their FAFSA, students will receive a confirmation email that, unlike those that other applicants receive, will not include their Student Aid Index, or SAI — which determines a family’s financial need — or a calculation of their federal-aid eligibility. Applicants won’t receive that crucial information until their FAFSA is complete. But their FAFSA won’t be complete until each parent without a Social Security number fills in their part of the form. And that won’t even be possible until sometime next month.
“I do not think this temporary workaround is meaningful,” Teresa Steinkamp, director of advising at the Scholarship Foundation of St. Louis, told The Chronicle on Wednesday. “That they still have not found resolution to such a pressing matter for students and families is highly exasperating.”
Steinkamp worries about the extra effort that the workaround will require of families. The instructions tell students to check the status of their application “starting in the first half of March,” when the department has said it will begin processing FAFSAs. Once applicants see an “Action Required” status message indicating that their application has been processed, they must make sure that all required contributors without a Social Security number then log into the FAFSA and complete a “correction process.” Those contributors must provide their signature, as well as consent to share their financial information.
That will allow the department to access parents’ income and tax data from the Internal Revenue Service, enabling it to calculate an SAI. Before resubmitting the form, applicants must make any other necessary corrections, such as adding colleges that should receive their FAFSA data. Only then will colleges receive Institutional Student Information Records, or ISIRs, enabling them to create financial-aid offers.
An applicant with one parent who has a Social Security number and another who doesn’t must follow a different set of instructions. Some students in that situation who used the workaround on Wednesday received an estimated SAI with their confirmation email, two college counselors told The Chronicle. But those applicants will still need to complete the correction process later on.
The entire process will increase “the time, energy, and effort for students and families to complete the form,” Steinkamp said. “Students and families in this population have already spent hours upon hours trying to create FSA IDs, verify identities, and file the form.”
The temporary workaround comes with some confusing wrinkles. One concerns the paper version of the FAFSA, which some applicants unable to complete the online version have submitted instead. But any applicants who opt to use the workaround to submit an online application will invalidate their paper forms, because the former will be processed first.
That means the submission date of an applicant’s online form will override that of the paper form they submitted previously. And that’s why the department advises students who submitted a paper FAFSA to meet a deadline in January or February not to submit a duplicate version of the form.
But wait. The workaround’s “frequently asked questions” section says that because paper forms will be processed “in the weeks that follow” the processing of online forms, “it’s highly recommended that all applicants apply via the online form, whenever possible, to prevent further delays.”
If your head is spinning, you’re not alone.
Sara Urquidez, executive director of the Academic Success Program, which provides college advising to about 7,000 high-school seniors in Dallas, Houston, and College Station, Tex., said that though the workaround “feels like movement forward,” it won’t do much to alleviate many families’ concerns about completing the FAFSA: “It creates additional hurdles for students, adds burdens to high-school staff and college-access counselors, and further strains financial-aid offices by sending forms that will not only be incomplete but need further follow up and action.”
It creates additional hurdles for students, adds burdens to high-school staff and college-access counselors, and further strains financial-aid offices by sending forms that will not only be incomplete but need further follow up and action.
Like many college advisers, Urquidez has been worrying about how states and colleges will adjust their processes to account for the FAFSA-processing delays and reserve funding for applicants who so far have been unable to complete the form through no fault of their own. She doubts that the workaround will help many of those students: “Sending an incomplete ISIR to colleges stamped with a mid-March date isn’t going to get a financial letter to a student any sooner.” She expects that the workaround will require more follow-up with families in schools and communities with already strained resources.
“In many ways, this proposed solution is too little, too late,” Urquidez said, “with the burden of making difficult decisions on how to proceed forward with financial-aid applications being placed on students and families with limited knowledge of how the financial-aid process works and that it can vary wildly by institution.”
Justin Draeger, president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said in a written statement that his organization appreciated the department’s efforts to provide an interim solution. “But this interim solution — which will be confusing and burdensome to many — must not distract us from the need to stay squarely focused on a permanent fix, which the department has promised by the first half of March.” Any further delays in the FAFSA process, he said, “would be disastrous for both students and schools.”
The key question now is how students and parents react to the workaround. Sara Yelich Miller, executive director of Green Halo Scholars, a nonprofit group that helps low-income and first-generation applicants in the Chicago area, said she was torn about the new process. On the one hand, she was glad to tell students with undocumented parents “that they can do something and feel like they were making some progress.”
But she also worries about how the process will play out, how long it will take for families to make corrections to their FAFSA — and for colleges to receive those corrections.
Her students’ reactions were mixed. Some told her that they would try to complete the workaround on Wednesday. “Others are pretty leery of anything at this point,” she said. “Rightfully so.”
