For many high school seniors and others hoping to attend college next year, the last few months have been a stress-filled struggle to complete the trouble-plagued, much-maligned Free Application for Federal Student Aid, widely known as FAFSA.
The rollout of the supposedly simplified form was so delayed, error-ridden and confusing that it derailed or severely complicated college decisions for millions of students, especially those from low-income, first-generation and undocumented families, and held up decisions by private scholarship programs.
Just 40.2% of high school seniors had completed the FAFSA as of May 10, compared to 49.6% at the same time last year, according to the National College Attainment Network.
To give students more time to weigh options, more than 200 colleges and universities pushed back their traditional May 1 commitment deadlines, some until June 1, according to the American Council on Education.
To get a sense of the impact, The Hechinger Report spoke with high school students in Chicago and around the country, finding them through their schools, which means most had counselors helping them. For the millions of students who don’t, it’s an even more daunting task.
‘ON EDGE’ IN CHICAGO
By Matt Krupnick | The Hechinger Report
Samaya Acker stayed on top of her college plans all year.
She applied for early-action admission at 17 colleges, submitted her FAFSA application two days after the window opened and, just in case, had a backup plan: joining the military.
Acker, 18, a senior at Air Force Academy High School on the South Side who has “Power” tattooed in script on her arm, was accepted by 16 colleges — her top choice, the University of Chicago, was the only one to turn her down. She planned to spend a few months in the Air National Guard to help pay for college.
But, as scholarship and deposit deadlines approached, her FAFSA application was still classified as “pending” three months after she submitted it.
“It really put me on edge,” says Acker, whose high school years were interrupted by COVID-19 and then by the birth of her son halfway through her sophomore year but who still is graduating with a weighted grade-point average above 4.0.
Just before the college commitment deadlines, Acker was awarded a Gates Scholarship, covering the full cost of college for high-achieving students from underrepresented groups. Acker, who is Black, accepted her offer of admission from Loyola University Chicago, where tuition alone is more than $52,000 a year. She’s aiming ultimately to become an anesthesiologist. (The Gates Foundation is among the funders of The Hechinger Report.)
Some students at Hubbard High School on the Southwest Side weren’t as lucky.
The FAFSA delays created special challenges for students whose parents are undocumented immigrants, including many at Hubbard. Four seniors with undocumented parents say they waited months for the federal government to fix a glitch that prevented parents without Social Security numbers from submitting financial information.
The glitch finally got fixed, but all four were still waiting this month to find out how much financial aid they might receive.
“There’s really not much I can do,” says Javier Magana, 18, who was trying to figure out whether he could afford any of the colleges that accepted him. “It’s definitely been frustrating because I’ve been trying my best.”
Dulcinea Basile (second from right), a college and career coach at Hubbard High School on the Southwest Side, at school with (from left) seniors Javier Magana, Octavio Rodriguez and Ixchel Ortiz, has worried for months that financial aid delays might cause some students to decide not to go to college.
Matt Krupnick | The Hechinger Report
Ixchel Ortiz, 17, plans to go to community college at one of the City Colleges but says if she doesn’t receive financial aid, even that would have to wait.
Isaac Raygoza and Octavio Rodriguez, both 18, say they had a few four-year college options but likely wouldn’t be able to pursue any of them without a FAFSA answer.
Rodriguez says he had been repeatedly frustrated by the FAFSA.
“I would go home and wait 20 to 30 minutes on hold, and we didn’t get anywhere,” he says.
In late April, he was notified he had misspelled his name on the application. In mid-May, he was still waiting to hear whether he needed to reapply from scratch.
“I’m slightly stressed,” he says.
Raygoza says he submitted his application on time but failed to notice an error message that prevented it from being processed. He resubmitted it in late April.
“I was just shocked it was never processed,” he says. “I had to do it all again.”
All four say they would likely take a year off to work if they don’t get financial aid.
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
Damiana Beltran (right), a senior at Mission High School in San Francisco, has been working with Wilber Ramirez and other staff members of a nonprofit group that runs the school’s Future Center, where students get advice about college options and financial aid. It was touch-and-go whether her FAFSA form would be processed in time for her to attend her top choice for college.
Gail Cornwall | The Hechinger Report
IN SAN FRANCISCO, ‘STRESSING ME EVERY DAY’
By Gail Cornwall | The Hechinger Report
No one in Damiana Beltran’s family went to college, so she didn’t picture it in her future.
But, at the end of her junior year, “everybody” at Mission High School in San Francisco started talking about applying. So she did, too.
San José State University admitted her, as did a few other schools. Excited, Beltran entertained visions of becoming a psychologist and showing her younger brother “you don’t have to be from the wealthiest family” to go to college.
But the online FAFSA form wouldn’t let Beltran, who is a U.S. citizen, submit her application because her mother, who isn’t, doesn’t have a Social Security number. They tried using her individual taxpayer identification number but got an error message. Leaving the field blank didn’t work either. Beltran’s mother skipped work to get help at the school’s Future Center but still no dice. Eventually, they mailed in a paper version.
When May 1 passed with no offer of aid — or even an indication her FAFSA had been received — Beltran decided to give up on attending the schools that would require her to pay for housing and a meal plan. If she went to nearby San Francisco State University, living at home would mean not needing to ask her mother to take on debt.
“I want to go to San José, but I don’t want to do that to her,” a teary Beltran said in April. “I think about it a lot during classes. During the whole school day, it’s in the back of my head.”
She’s been having trouble sleeping.
Her classmate Josue Hernandez also lost sleep over FAFSA problems. He says it took about a month and two attempts to upload his undocumented parents’ IDs. Once he did, it took about three weeks to process. The senior, who had been accepted to 16 schools, says he thought, “It was 12 years of hard work, and I finally got in, but I might not even be able to go.”
Hernandez’s other hope was scholarships. So he cut back his hours at an after-school job to work on the applications, then stayed up late to do the homework he’d pushed aside. Most of his free periods, including lunches, were spent figuring out how to pay for college.
“It was stressing me every day,” Hernandez says.
Eventually, the University of California, Berkeley, told him his FAFSA had gone through and financial aid would pay for almost everything. The SEED Scholars Honors Program would likely take care of the rest.
“It’s finally over,” he says.
That’s not how things went for Alessandro Mejia, though. As a senior in the challenging Game Design Academy at Balboa High School, he has the coding skills to major in computer science at one of the four-year colleges he got into.
“College is my first choice,” Mejia says, but making it work financially “would just be much harder on our family.”
He was considering trade school: “Being an electrician or a car mechanic doesn’t seem too bad.”
Of abandoning a tech career, he says, “I’m a little frustrated, but I feel like I developed a good work ethic in school so … it’s not completely a waste.”
School counselor Katherine Valle shook her head as she listened to Mejia. The Game Design Academy, she says, “is our hardest pathway, and we don’t have a lot of Latino males in it. To know he did that and is going to end up being a mechanic is just …”
With less than a week to spare, though, Mejia learned his FAFSA had finally been processed, and he committed to San Francisco State.
For Beltran, though, the May 15 deadline passed, and she was “still waiting for my FAFSA to come in” and hadn’t submitted an intent to register.
Zion Wilson says the FAFSA delays gave her time in which to decide against going to college, as she originally had planned. She got in to several universities but decided instead to study information technology as a trainee through Grads2Careers, a Baltimore program.
Kavitha Cardoza | The Hechinger Report
IN BALTIMORE, A WELCOME DELAY
By Kavitha Cardoza | The Hechinger Report
For Zion Wilson and Camryn Carter, seniors at the Academy for College and Career Exploration in Baltimore, the delays and the need to constantly try to log into FAFSA accounts that kept freezing were frustrating. But both students were relieved the glitches with the forms meant their college admission deadlines got pushed back.
“The last thing I wanted to do was make a fast-paced decision,” says Wilson, 17. “I felt the FAFSA delay gave me more of a chance to decide what I actually wanted to do.”
She had applied for computer science programs at several colleges but was nervous about taking out loans. Even though Baltimore City Community College would be tuition-free for her, she worried she wouldn’t have enough spending money unless she worked.
Wilson was admitted to her top three choices — BCCC, University of Maryland Eastern Shore and Coppin State University. Even with scholarships, though, she decided not to go but to go straight into the workforce instead through a program called Grads2Careers, through which she will get training in information technology.
“It kind of sounded like I can just do the exact same thing that I would be doing if I went to college, but I can just start now versus waiting two years to start,” Wilson says.
Her classmate Carter, 18, is a serious student who is also on the school’s baseball, wrestling and track teams. He says he has never wavered from his childhood decision to study biology that began when he was about 4 years old, and his grandmother tuned to the National Geographic channel on TV.
“I was, like, ‘Stop, stop, stop,’ ” he says, recalling seeing video of a lion attacking a zebra.
Carter was hooked. He started watching the channel every day.
“I fell in love with ants, ecosystems,” he says. “That just sparked my interest in biology.”
Carter applied to 14 colleges. He says filling out the forms was challenging because the delayed release of the FAFSA meant he was doing it while taking a demanding courseload, including Advanced Placement Program classes in literature and calculus.
“It was really time-consuming and really work-heavy, with a lot of essays, a lot of homework,” he says.
But the FAFSA delay also meant his mother had more time to finish the form. Because he’s the oldest of four children, she hadn’t had to complete a form like this before that asks for a lot of personal information, including tax data.
“My mom was just brushing over it,” he says. “But I was, like, ‘No, you really have to do this because this is for my future. Like, you don’t do this, I’ll have so much debt.’ So I was just telling her to please get on it.”
She did, but Carter says it likely wouldn’t have gotten done without the delay.
Carter got in to his dream school — the University of Maryland, College Park — with a full scholarship that includes tuition, meals and accommodation. His second choice, McDaniel College, also offered him a generous scholarship, but he says he still would have had to pay $6,000 a year.
“Definitely, money was a big factor,” he says.
Camryn Carter got in to the University of Maryland, College Park with a full scholarship that includes tuition, meals and accommodation. Which was great not only because it’s his dream school but also because his second choice for college also accepted him but, even with a scholarship, he would have had to pay $6,000 a year to go there. “Definitely, money was a big factor,” he says.
Kavitha Cardoza | The Hechinger Report
IN SOUTH CAROLINA, ‘THE WAITING GAME’
By Ariel Gilreath | The Hechinger Report
Sisters Chylicia and Chy’Kyla Henderson worked hard to graduate early from Eastside High School in Greenville, South Carolina.
They filled their schedules and took virtual classes as well, so Chylicia, now 18, could be done with school a semester early and Chy’Kyla, 17, could graduate after her junior year. Both want to attend college but need financial aid.
Nichole Henderson says the stress of trying to fill out FAFSA forms for her daughters led her to take them and two other graduating seniors she knew to a FAFSA workshop at a college in April. Even with help, though, she found the forms confusing. Chylicia’s asked for Nichole’s tax information, she says, but Chy’Kyla’s did not.
“As a parent, it’s stressful,” Henderson says.
Chylicia is thinking about pursuing nursing or social work and leaning toward starting at Greenville Technical College, a community college. The school emailed her, saying it needed more information on her financial aid application. She says it wasn’t clear whether that stemmed from the FAFSA form or something else.
Then, on May 8, she got an email from the South Carolina Tuition Grants program, which provides up to $4,800 in need-based scholarships, saying she was tentatively approved for the full amount. She still hasn’t resolved the paperwork at Greenville Technical College, though, so she isn’t sure yet whether she can go there.
The family worries Chy’Kyla’s will have the same issue. Like her sister, she’s considering starting at a community college. By earlier this month, she hadn’t gotten word about financial aid from any schools or any need-based scholarship programs.
“We’re just playing the waiting game,” their mother says.
