What the FAFSA Just Happened?

Where is my financial aid? What is college really going to cost me? These are the kinds of questions lots of students are asking this academic year, and it’s all because of a government screw-up. The disastrous rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as FAFSA, has created uncertainty about students’ financial-aid packages — and many of the most vulnerable are having the hardest time.

Guest: Eric Hoover, senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education

Related Reading:

• The FAFSA Isn’t Fixed for Everyone: Some students are still stuck in the federal-aid system — and they’re demoralized.
• Stuck in Limbo: How the FAFSA crisis has stranded higher ed’s most vulnerable applicants.

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling This is College Matters from the Chronicle. I’m Jack Stripling.

Eric Hoover - I saw students pounding desks, putting their heads down on tables. And in some cases, tearing up or crying, having to run out of the room just because they couldn’t get a federal aid offer in the time frame that they had expected it.

Jack Stripling This academic year, lots of students are headed to college without any clue of how they’ll pay for it. They’re in kind of a limbo because of something known as FAFSA or the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. And bear with me, because this is about paperwork. FAFSA is a federal form that prospective college students fill out every year to determine how much money they can get from the government for tuition and fees. Filling out this form has been an annoying rite of passage for students, many of whom can’t decide whether college is even an option until this pesky task is complete. The U.S. Department of Education recently sought to simplify it, but things did not go as planned. The rollout of the form in December 2023 was a train wreck. Technical glitches made the form impossible for some students to complete, and some just gave up trying to fill it out. In a cruel irony, many of the students who’ve experienced the worst problems in this slow moving crisis are the same people who need the most help accessing college. Today on the show, my colleague Eric Hoover breaks down who FAFSA is failing, and how families are making the calculation of whether college is worth it.

Jack Stripling - Eric, great to have you here on College Matters from the Chronicle.

Eric Hoover Thank you Jack. Great to be with you.

Jack Stripling - So Eric break this down for me. Tell me in a real practical way how the FAFSA ends up getting me money if I’m going to college.

Eric Hoover Right. Well, colleges need a measure of your family’s ability to pay for college. Right. And so there is a federal methodology that is built into the FAFSA. So a college wants to know do you qualify for federal aid, and if so, how much federal aid will you get? Well, once you complete the FAFSA, you will know that as an applicant and the college will know that. And so it is the bedrock for the entire financial aid system, whether you intend to enroll at a community college or a four-year your institution, you need to complete the FAFSA to get any federal aid. So it is a form that everyone and every financial aid office needs to work with to figure out how to best allot scarce resources, and to figure out what is a fair amount of money to give this applicant versus this applicant over here.

Jack Stripling - So Eric, there’s a lot of different types of financial aid, and I want to make sure I understand how the FAFSA fits into the way that it’s doled out to students. In one bucket, we have institutional aid, which includes scholarships provided by the colleges themselves; they’re essentially dipping into their own bank accounts to help their students. Those colleges often use the FAFSA to help determine how much money the scholarship will be worth. Now, In another bucket, we have federal money, like Pell Grants, which students have to fill out the FAFSA in order to receive. And the colleges are kind of the middle man for that money, right? Typically, the college applies that federal money toward a student’s tuition and fees, and anything leftover can go directly to the student. So, I’m sure there are probably exceptions to what I’ve described here, but do I generally have this right?

Eric Hoover Yes that’s exactly right.

Jack Stripling So what the hell happened?

Eric Hoover Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, I think for all the years that FAFSA simplification, that is the effort to overhaul and simplify the FAFSA, for all the years that went into it, the Education Department just ran out of time. It was a massive overhaul. The FAFSA was based on antiquated technology systems, and they were required to meet a deadline to get the FAFSA available by this past January 1st. They barely made that deadline, but they did not deliver a fully functioning FAFSA. Early on it was just a lot of glitches, I talked to so many families who got almost all the way through the FAFSA, and then the submit button just disappeared. Many folks were just stuck, kind of in limbo. It wasn’t just glitches or frozen buttons. It was also like the numbers that the system relies on. More recently, colleges receiving processed FAFSAs started to notice something funny. The data they could tell very quickly and easily in many cases was wrong. And that is, they couldn’t trust the calculations that the FAFSA system was spitting out and sending to their institutions. And so that was a major concern that affected colleges and students alike. If you and I both applied to College X, and College X can see that there’s problems with the data, they might worry that they’re about to award one of us more aid than we actually are entitled to, based on the FAFSA methodology, but the other one might be awarded less and so they have to be accurate, right? You know, we’re just a mess. And they were coming through and colleges weren’t sure what to make of that. And so that led to further delays to make sure that all of the inaccurate data had been fixed and ironed out within the department and then sent back to colleges.

Jack Stripling So this is not Ticketmaster freezes and we don’t get Taylor Swift tickets. This is every entity that FAFSA touches is now impacted by this. How much money you get, whether the offer is right. Colleges skeptical about whether the numbers are correct, delays in getting you these answers, all of these things. It sounds like a nightmare.

Eric Hoover This just brings an entire industry, the industry of higher education… So colleges, universities, but also state systems, state aid systems, scholarship entities, there are so many small and large private scholarships that are going to want to see a completed FAFSA that is a processed FAFSA to award aid to students. So this entire industry and everything that depends on it, was just basically brought to its knees and brought to a halt.

Jack Stripling Have you been able to wrap your arms around the size of the fiasco? Is there anything out there that you’re looking at and monitoring completion rates, things like that of the form that tell us anything?

Eric Hoover It’s a jarring graph to look at. If you look at federal data that’s been released regularly throughout the year and tracked by the National College Attainment Network, I think every Friday. When you look at the completion rate, about 10% fewer graduating high school seniors completed the FAFSA this year. You know, and I think close to 14 million FAFSAs have been filed overall. That’s a huge drop. And I think that is the chart that people keep looking at or forcing themselves to look at. And I think as we get on through the year, the less likely it is that we’ll see that number improve. You think of students who graduated in May or June of 2024, once it gets deep into the summer and fall, like they’re probably just not going to fill out that federal aid form. What people don’t know is what does that look like? What does that translate into? How many of those 10% or so would have otherwise gone to college? People are going to be trying to figure out the impact of that decline on higher ed in general, and certainly on particular colleges for months and years to come.

Jack Stripling You’ve reported on kind of a cruel irony that some of the students who had the most trouble are the students who also have life circumstances that, even in the best of circumstances, would make it hard to go to college. Talk to me a little bit about why that particular group of students has had trouble.

Eric Hoover Well, you know, I think it’s fair to say that no subgroup of applicants was hit harder than US born students who have parents who aren’t citizens. So undocumented parents. We’re talking generally here about a subgroup of students who already face plenty of challenges when it comes to figuring out how to apply to college and how to apply for financial aid and figuring out how they’re going to afford it. These are students who have parents who don’t have a Social Security number. And these students are fully entitled to federal aid. But it is harder for them now, especially to get that aid that is their right.

Jack Stripling: Can you tell me why students who have undocumented parents have been affected so severely by this crisis?

Eric Hoover Part of FAFSA simplification was intended to enable those families to benefit from the new and improved system. Part of that new and improved system for everyone was meant to be that you could rather easily link your FAFSA application to the IRS database and directly port in your tax information. Doing that cuts down on errors. That’s something that was hailed as one of the major changes that would benefit all families. Hey, if you don’t have to enter your own tax information manually anymore, or go through this kind of clunky transfer process that existed previously. Oh my gosh, you can pre-populate part of your form. Won’t that be easier for everyone? Well, it probably was easier for many families, but that part of the process never worked for parents who are undocumented. And so, there was just a broken bridge in between the FAFSA and the Internal Revenue Service database and also the Department of Homeland Security database. And this is the broken bridge that has hung up so many mixed status families, undocumented parents haven’t been able to use that new and improved, smoother transfer of data process. And so they had to go through a workaround, that involved them getting on the telephone to try to confirm their identity through other means. They had to verify their identity to be able to complete their fortunate portion of the FAFSA. And until they did, the FAFSA that their son or daughter had completed themselves, could not be moved forward, cannot be processed by the government, and could not result in a financial aid offer for colleges.

Jack Stripling So what was once an arduous and painstaking process for students whose parents were undocumented became even more so or even impossible.

Eric Hoover I don’t know that the previous process was that arduous. It was just, previously, undocumented parents were required to go through this kind of old school analog process. Print something out, sign it, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, and mail it off to a processing facility. Where, many counselors will tell you, it would sit for a while, maybe a long while before it was processed, allowing the kiddos FAFSA to move forward. So that was a time consuming process on the back end. It was relatively easy for parents to do, but the thought was, let’s bring everyone, all families, including undocumented parents who don’t have a Social Security number, into the 21st century and create a process that will enable all of them, regardless of their citizenship status, to seamlessly, supposedly, and painlessly bring in their tax information online. It’s just that that part of the process did not work at all, or work very well for undocumented parents who were being asked for the first time to verify their identity while interfacing with the FAFSA on their computer. And so this year, all of those students, when it came time to have their parents try to fill out their portion of the FAFSA and so many cases, watched their mothers and fathers try but fail to get through this form, and it wasn’t their fault, it was the FAFSA’s fault. And hitting roadblock after roadblock, they weren’t able to complete it. And so I’ve talked to students about the impact of that. Many students with undocumented parents already feel like they’re not fully welcome in this country. They feel anxious about their place in this country. And oh gosh, when my mother and father, who are so proud of me, tried to do this one thing to get through the form, and they could not, some of them told me that their parents cried. Some of them told me that their parents felt like they had failed their kiddo just because they couldn’t get through this form. So I think there is an emotional impact of that. I mean, you know, how warm and welcome would you feel about your government as a U.S. born student, knowing that your parents might have tried for weeks or months repeatedly to get through the FAFSA, and it’s just not working for them? That’s a kind of a chilling message that young people have been sent.

Jack Stripling - But this goes beyond undocumented families, right? Who else is being affected?

Eric Hoover Well, I’ll mention a student who I’ve been in touch with in recent days happens to be a student who has experienced homelessness most of her life. She’s already enrolled in college. She’s got straight A’s. She’s doing great. But she filed the FAFSA in early January, a few days after it became available, and she still doesn’t have a financial aid offer. She already knows where she’s going to college for her second year, but she needs that money. She needs that aid disbursement. She needs that Pell Grant. And she’s looking at a looming deadline to make her next payment so that she can stay enrolled in college. And she still doesn’t have that federal aid that’s come through. Ah, and another headache for her, is that she has a private scholarship that she was supposed to receive for 4 or 5 years, but in order to renew it, she has to show that scholarship agency, a private scholarship agency, her financial aid offer, which she doesn’t have. And she knows that the deadline for showing that financial aid offer to the scholarship organization has passed at the end of July, so she’s got her fingers crossed that she’ll still somehow end up with that scholarship money that she needs in addition to her federal aid, but she just doesn’t know that. And it was a reminder that, yes, the FAFSA is a form, right? It’s a, it’s a lengthy government document, but when you spend time around students trying to get through it, thinking about the big step they’re about to take in their lives - in most cases the students in this low-income high school I visited are about to become the first in their families to ever enroll in college - they just want to get on with their lives. They want to get on with their senior year, and they want to talk about prom, and they just want to be done with the whole college admissions process. They want to be able to tell their friends, “I’m going to this college.” They want to buy a sweatshirt or a hat from the college that they’ve chosen. And then just being stuck in limbo, it just felt especially cruel. And again, for them, this wasn’t just a headache or a temporary setback. It felt like even a question of like who I am and who I’m trying to be in this world was called into question. 17 year olds and 18 year olds we know right, can get kind of emotional about pretty much anything on a dime. But yeah, I saw students pounding desks, putting their heads down on tables. And in some cases, tearing up or crying, having to run out of the room just because they couldn’t get a federal aid offer in the time frame that they had expected. And so one young woman said to me, I feel like the FAFSA has blown a hole in my life. And another said, this has made me question whether college is really for me, and I wouldn’t discount how powerful a statement that is, even if many of them ended up getting through it in the end.

Jack Stripling - Stick around, we’ll be back in a minute.

Jack Stripling - Eric, for a lot of students, college is only possible with the help of financial aid. For others, it’s nice to have, but not essential. Can you talk about how the FAFSA crisis has affected students differently, depending on their financial circumstances?

Eric Hoover For many lucky students, they will be able to put this in the rearview mirror. But for students who are especially vulnerable… I’ve interviewed so many students throughout 2024 who’ve talked to me about how $500 or $100 or $50 is a huge amount of money in their lives. And so when you think about students who don’t have much money, who are dealing with this stress and uncertainty, I think in some cases it will take a toll and affect them as college students. And what several students who are still waiting for an aid offer this year have told me is they’re worried about what happens in the next cycle. There’s great uncertainty looming over the FAFSA as we head into the next financial aid cycle later this year. Will the FAFSA be totally fixed? Will there be some of the same problems further delaying students? Will there be new glitches and gremlins bedeviling the system? So I think for students who are already enrolled, can this mess with their momentum? I think that’s a concern. And yeah, it’ll work out for many students, but for some students, it just won’t, right? They won’t stay in college. Some have decided to forego college, at least for this fall semester, because of the fact that in some cases, they’re still stuck and can’t get financial aid. And then, you know, the big question is what is the downstream effect? Students who have just heard about this, right, maybe they watched their older sibling or heard about a friend who hit all these snags, how does this complicate their understanding of like how easy it’s going to be for me, particularly if they’re a low income, first in their family to attend college, student? I don’t know that it’s going to be so rosy for students who are already perhaps ambivalent about this whole college thing.

Jack Stripling And a few hundred dollars is the difference between I’m going to college and I’m not?

Eric Hoover Right, I mean, the fact is, for many Americans attending college, a few hundred dollars either way could be the difference between passing go and continuing on through college or dropping out, stopping out. So maybe that’s a flat tire. Maybe that’s your child’s doctor bill that you weren’t expecting that week. I mean, I just talked to a student who told me that as she’s waiting for federal aid that she doesn’t have, she’s been looking at the cost of toothpaste and making decisions about which toothpaste to choose based on maybe 25 cent difference, right? For some families, that’s not something they need to think about. But some students are making constant decisions, even for small dollars here and there, so that they can stay afloat and continue on to their degree.

Jack Stripling - So, are there any students who are getting through this FAFSA thing without any trouble?

Eric Hoover Yeah. I mean, look, it is a fact that many students had little or no problem filling out the FAFSA in 2024, especially after the first rough couple of weeks where glitches were affecting basically everyone or seemingly hindering people at random. A wise high school counselor on the West Coast, has observed that, you know, in his experience, “the FAFSA works well for those families it works for.” And I’ve talked to plenty of students and parents who had no trouble at all. Even some students who had a particular snag along the way, including some students who throughout the summer are still waiting for aid offers. They’ve told me, particularly if they filled out the FAFSA previously, if they’re already in college, they’ve told me they think the new form is easier. Simpler, more user friendly. Even some students who hit a brick wall through no fault of their own while trying to get through the FAFSA, have told me that they think it’s better than the previous model. The trick is, you know, it’s a hard thing to talk about. Hey, all these people over here had a swell time and it was smooth sailing and were able to do the FAFSA in 10 or 15 minutes. When we live in a country where so many people weren’t able to get through it after months and months.

Jack Stripling It’s just, it’s compelling to hear you frame it this way that people’s dreams and futures are really hanging in the balance here because of what seems a technical problem. It’s heartbreaking. And I wonder, that heartbreak is shared by the students and their families for sure. But who are the people who are on the front lines trying to help these students rectify this situation, and what has happened to their lives as a result of this?

Eric Hoover Yeah. Well, I mean, first and foremost, high school counselors, college advisors, the many folks from community based organizations that work closely with college applicants, particularly low income and first generation college applicants. They’ve just been put through the ringer. Right. So we’re talking about, honestly, in my experience, writing for many years about college access and college admissions, the adults whose job it is to help students, particularly students who need a lot of help, get through the admissions process and the federal aid process, are already people who are inclined to work eight days a week, to work well into the evening, to get on the phone with a student or parent late at night to meet families at Starbucks if they don’t have internet at home and help them complete an aid form or a college application, you name it. That’s what these folks do in a normal year. And in this year, well, they just haven’t really been sleeping. So many counselors I’m in touch with were, as one told me, she was just feeling like she was waking up in agony every day. And why was that? Well, she, like many counselors, sees herself as an evangelist, she has said, for higher education, often dealing with families who are skeptical or they think will never be able to afford it. Or, my son or daughter should just graduate from high school and start working. And so many counselors are trying to communicate that families should at least consider higher education, consider their options. And they’ve been people who preached the idea that it’s going to be okay; you can afford at least some colleges. Your son or daughter should at least consider it seriously. And then, so many members of those communities this year came to counselors asking, you said it was going to be okay. What happened? Why can’t we get to this form? And that has been a really tough situation to put counselors in. And how do you sit down and counsel a low income family about making sense of their aid offers if they don’t have any on the table to look at? That has worn out many people who have plenty of other reasons to be worn out as they help students through this process in a normal year.

Jack Stripling You know, the one group we haven’t really talked about here is the colleges themselves. Presumably they want to be able to give aid offers to these students. They want to be able to recruit these students. A lot of colleges are super gung ho about the very students you’re describing what’s this experience been like for them.

Eric Hoover If you are an admissions or enrollment official, and particularly if you work in a financial aid office, you know the financial aid profession has been basically hung out to dry by the FAFSA debacle. They’re not able to work nearly as efficiently as they normally would. Students are waiting. Families are waiting for aid offers, and it’s your office’s job and responsibility to create those aid offers and get them out in a timely fashion. And to the extent that that has just not been a possibility in so many instances this year, that is agonizing, right? And so the impact on some colleges will be minimal.Oon other institutions, it’'ll be great. I’m doing some reporting right now on a college that is coming up about 20% short of its targeted enrollment for this year’s freshman class. Not all, but many of the students who didn’t come are from low income, if not extremely low-income families. And so, coming in with a freshman class that’s about 20% smaller than what you had anticipated has implications not just for the college’s finances, but also for like the culture that they’re trying to create. That institution’s freshman class will be less diverse socioeconomically, as well as in terms of race and ethnicity than they probably would have ended up with. And so figuring out how to recover from that and figuring out what the long term implications of that are going to be, you know, what the experience of being a student on that campus, at least for some folks, might be different than it would have been otherwise. And so that’s a major headache, right? Many colleges have said that they’ve had layoffs and furloughs as a direct result, at least in part of a downturn in the number of students who have sent deposits, many of whom might have come otherwise, if not for the FAFSA crisis.

Jack Stripling It can mean people’s jobs.

Eric Hoover Right, and there’s no certainty that the next round of the FAFSA will be smooth sailing, so this could all happen again. I think there’s great concern in many enrollment offices, and certainly in financial aid offices, that the sequel is, is looming. And, you know, sometimes sequels are great; sometimes they’re worse than the original. But the sequel to the FAFSA crisis is, I think, what people are just bracing for. If it’s not as bad this time around as it was the first time around, it can still be pretty bad.

Jack Stripling Yeah. You know, you and I have both been writing about higher education for a long time, and one of the recurring stories that we cover is about public confidence in college. And that can seem like kind of an esoteric thing to care about, whether people think college is good. I wonder what you think this crisis has done to people’s confidence in higher education, and whether that has any long term effects that we should care about?

Eric Hoover I think the FAFSA crisis could have a long term impact on how at least some

Americans see higher education. Most people don’t understand the ins and outs of the FAFSA. They just know it’s not working. They just know it took forever to get an aid offer, or they just know that they still don’t have an aid offer months after filling out the darn form. For some families, it’s been more. It’s been more than frustrating. It’s been more than annoying. It’s been frightening and it’s been harrowing. And people talk to their friends, to their family members. I talked to folks from a high school in San Diego who said, months into the FAFSA crisis, they were hearing from families who said that, oh, we’ve heard that students who were born in the US but who have undocumented parents can no longer get federal aid. Well, we know that that’s not true. Students who are born in the U.S. are entitled to federal aid, regardless of their parent’s immigration status. But, word gets around that the system isn’t working…it’s not hard to imagine why some families in that community apparently were hearing, oh, something has changed this year, and those students aren’t able to get federal aid, and you can’t really blame them for making that connection because some students weren’t able to get federal aid. And I think until families and high school counselors see that things are working better, then this is… this is just going to be a crisis for at least another year to come, unfortunately. So I think the story of the FAFSA saga is partly a story about the kind of society we want to live in, right? Don’t we want to live in a society where people from all backgrounds, including low income backgrounds, including people who have been marginalized and underrepresented in this country forever? Shouldn’t people who fit those descriptions in some way have the broadest set of opportunities and chances to move forward in life, whatever that looks like, and to get to and get through higher ed? And if you answer yes, I would say, well, then this story is kind of at the moment a sad story because those opportunities have been constrained and so many students have been limited and had their choices narrowed as they’re trying to make their way on to do things that we want young people to do, right, like get to college and become our doctors and nurses and schoolteachers. And we want those people, I hope, to be representative of this country. And this year, the FAFSA just made kind of the launching point for many people who want to seek opportunities a little bit more difficult, if not a lot more so.

Jack Stripling Eric Hoover, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.

Eric Hoover Thank you for having me, Jack.

Jack Stripling - If you wanna read Eric Hoover’s coverage of the FAFSA crisis and all things about students and admissions, check out Chronicle dot com. College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges.If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode.

You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Special thanks to our colleagues, Brock Read, Laura Krantz, Sarah Brown, Claire Wallace, Ron Coddington, Josh Hatch, Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.