A technical glitch’s outsize impact on diversity
The Education Department’s disastrous December rollout of the new FAFSA form will probably have an outsize impact on the demographic makeup of this fall’s freshman class.
The revamped Free Application for Federal Student Aid was originally intended to make obtaining financial aid less cumbersome for low-income students by drastically shrinking the number of questions they’d have to answer. But the litany of technical hiccups, error messages, and widespread confusion students now experience, our reporter Eric Hoover writes, has, arguably, made things worse.
Previously, you could access the FAFSA with a single sign-on, allowing you to see both the student and parent portions. But now the form is a “role-based” application, in which students see only the questions they must answer, and parents get their own set of questions. After completing their portion, students invite their parent to contribute, and then the parent gets an email prompting them to complete their portion. Sounds simple, right?
But in low-income communities, it’s easy to find parents who don’t have an email account, who don’t know how to use a computer, who don’t have reliable internet access, who don’t read in English, who don’t have just one job, who don’t have a predictable schedule, and who don’t have much, if any, free time. That’s why many underrepresented students have long completed the entirety of the FAFSA on their own, often at school, with their parents’ permission.
No applicants are likely to be more affected than those with one or more undocumented parents, who made up almost 7 percent of public-school students in 2021, Hoover writes.
Because of an apparent glitch, parents without a Social Security number are locked out of the system: Even those who manage to create an FSA ID can’t start a FAFSA themselves — or contribute to a FAFSA their student has started. “There is currently no workaround for a parent without an SSN,” says a list of technical issues that the Education Department’s aid office posted on January 4. Such families, it says, will be able to finish the FAFSA “once the issue is resolved.” But the student-aid office hasn’t indicated how much longer that will take.
Hoover details how an overburdened and underresourced department is spawning fear and anxiety in majority-Latino communities and derailing college-going plans for academic superstars.
But even when the dust settles, [Teresa] Steinkamp [director of advising at the Scholarship Foundation of St. Louis] doesn’t think the new FAFSA will benefit all students equally. “There are students who are already going to struggle to navigate this process, through no fault of their own, due to the inequities we’ve built into all of our systems and structures,” she said. “And this new FAFSA doesn’t fully address those things in a way that’s going to make it markedly easier for those students to complete this application. The changes to the FAFSA don’t address the fact that there are still many students whose family and personal circumstances do not fit neatly into these expected boxes that the form provides for them.”
Many colleges have extended their May 1 decision deadlines to accommodate students. Others have not.
For all the anxiety this year over the dismantling of DEI and the end of affirmative action, affordability has been cited over and over again as the top reason students of color decide not to enroll in selective colleges.
For those with no way to complete the form right now, for those encountering confusing technical snags, for those with complicated family situations, and for those from mixed-status families, the “Better FAFSA” isn’t, at least not yet. For all of them, the application is still exactly what it has always been — a barrier.
What I’m reading
- Several towns are at odds over whether and how to memorialize Black lynching victims, Rachel Hatzipanagos writes for The Washington Post.
- “Today, nearly every facet of our society worships the false and pernicious view that diversity is, somehow, our greatest strength,” Ryan P. Williams and Scott Yenor write in defense of the Claremont Institute after a scathing New York Times investigation of their role in this year’s legislative attack on DEI. “The clichés of the diversity persuasion are on the lips of ‘educators,’ corporate CEOs, chiefs of police, our elite media, our military leaders, and countless others.”
- A lawsuit against Penn State argues that the university’s DEI programs created a hostile environment for white men, Conor Friedersdorf writes in The Atlantic.
- Roland Fryer defends DEI in this column in The Wall Street Journal.
