Texas schools can help fix Biden’s FAFSA disaster
Anyone who’s applied for college knows the anguish. Wrangling transcripts and references, perfecting the essay and maintaining decent grades can lead to a font of stress and anxiety that won’t subside until that first acceptance letter arrives.
Applying for financial aid only increases the pressure. Typically, as soon as the calendar flips to October, these students scramble to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, a series of questions the U.S. Department of Education uses to determine how much aid they qualify for. For Texans, the rush is even more frenzied since our state universities require students to complete the FAFSA before awarding aid on a first-come, first-serve basis.
This year, a law intended to simplify the process had the opposite effect.
The new application that emerged from the FAFSA Simplification Act of 2020 launched on Dec. 31, three months later than usual, foreshadowing what was to come: myriad delays and technical errors — including higher than normal application rejections that are taking months to resolve. The problems have sent students, families and admission offices scrambling to secure financial aid. The Chronicle’s Samantha Ketterer reported that 70,000 fewer Texas high school students have submitted FAFSA forms this year.
With college tuition skyrocketing over the past 20 years, FAFSA has been one of the few constant sources of college money for low- and middle-income students. That the Department of Education had nearly four years to prepare the new FAFSA and still botched the rollout, possibly impeding some students’ enrollment in the fall, is inexcusable.
At the University of Texas at Austin, an enrollment officer told the Chronicle that the financial aid office is hesitant to give offers because it’s unclear which applications have problems. At the University of Houston, processing delays will stretch into the early and late summer.
Ironically, one of the problems the new FAFSA was supposed to fix — allowing parents without Social Security numbers to fill out the form and access expanded eligibility for Pell grants — has instead gotten worse.
The Texas Tribune reported that the FAFSA glitches have disproportionately affected immigrant families, particularly those with mixed-residency, parents, who had been getting consistent error messages when they entered names or addresses that didn’t exactly match their child’s. Only students who are U.S. citizens or lawful residents are eligible to file a FAFSA, but in Texas, where 25% of all children have at least one parent who isn’t a U.S. citizen, the glitches are broadly felt.
By the time these students have their FAFSA applications processed, some state schools may have already distributed most of their financial aid.
Ten Texas Democrats in the U.S. House — including Houston-area Reps. Sylvia Garcia, Al Green and Sheila Jackson Lee — signed an open letter on April 8 urging Texas colleges and universities to track the amount of financial aid going to students whose parents had mixed-residency status and ensure they aren’t penalized for late applications. We support that proposal and urge the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to ensure universities are setting aside financial aid awards for students disproportionately impacted by the FAFSA errors.
The board should also consider extending the priority financial aid deadline for students who committed early to a certain Texas school; the cutoff was April 15. Given that only 40% of Texas high school seniors had completed the application as of March 29, we urge the board to give students another month.
The Biden administration deserves credit for expanding the eligibility for Pell grants to 1.7 million more Americans, but what good is that money if students can’t access it? Texas students left a whopping $443 million in Pell grants on the table last year by failing to complete their FAFSA forms. If we want to continue opening doors to higher education to as many young people as possible, Biden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona can’t allow FAFSA applications to languish in cyber bureaucracy. It’s time to show some urgency and get financial aid out to the students who need it most.