FAFSA "flop": College aid applications down >30%

[quesaisje]

The great FAFSA flop

FAFSA completion has long been considered correlated with the number of freshmen who show up to campuses in the fall. And through the first week of March, the number of high school seniors filling out the FAFSA was down by more than 30 percent, according to federal data analyzed by the National College Attainment Network, a nonprofit focused on helping students prepare for college. The drop in applications is even steeper at high schools in lower-income communities and those with large shares of Black and Hispanic students.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona isn’t satisfied with those submission numbers, and has urged colleges and school counselors to continue pushing students to fill out the form. [...] “There is a reason we’re having these headaches and these delays, because it’s simpler now,” Cardona said. “It’s not just a new website. It’s a new formula. We’re expecting more dollars to go out, but they have to submit. The delays, in my opinion, once we get this thing going are … going to be worth it.”

Has anyone here had firsthand experience with the new form? Is it as bad as the reporting suggests?

[Associate Justice PiT]

     I wonder if this is somehow related to the lockdown stealing instruction time from students, producing worse educational outcomes. Perhaps not if it is only materializing now and not in the prior couple years, but the drop being larger in lower SES communities suggests that the answer might be yes.

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

I don’t know about the new form but the form as always been a hot mess and super aggravating

[Kahane's Grave Is A Gender-Neutral Bathroom]

The great FAFSA flop

FAFSA completion has long been considered correlated with the number of freshmen who show up to campuses in the fall. And through the first week of March, the number of high school seniors filling out the FAFSA was down by more than 30 percent, according to federal data analyzed by the National College Attainment Network, a nonprofit focused on helping students prepare for college. The drop in applications is even steeper at high schools in lower-income communities and those with large shares of Black and Hispanic students.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona isn’t satisfied with those submission numbers, and has urged colleges and school counselors to continue pushing students to fill out the form. [...] “There is a reason we’re having these headaches and these delays, because it’s simpler now,” Cardona said. “It’s not just a new website. It’s a new formula. We’re expecting more dollars to go out, but they have to submit. The delays, in my opinion, once we get this thing going are … going to be worth it.”

Has anyone here had firsthand experience with the new form? Is it as bad as the reporting suggests?

According to all of the people I've talked to a year ahead of me, yes.

[GP270watch]

 I never understand why the American government makes every social program the clunkiest and most complicated it can be. The way the ACA operates, FASFA and financial aid with the colleges, the Alphabet soup of all the different parts of Medicare. It's like they make things as complicated as possible and it doesn't make the program better or save money.

[dead0man]

I never understand why the American government makes every social program the clunkiest and most complicated it can be. The way the ACA operates, FASFA and financial aid with the colleges, the Alphabet soup of all the different parts of Medicare. It's like they make things as complicated as possible and it doesn't make the program better or save money.

<insert yellow Florida avatar here>

[GP270watch]

I never understand why the American government makes every social program the clunkiest and most complicated it can be. The way the ACA operates, FASFA and financial aid with the colleges, the Alphabet soup of all the different parts of Medicare. It's like they make things as complicated as possible and it doesn't make the program better or save money.

<insert yellow Florida avatar here>

A lot of this is the fault of conservatives though. And yellow avatars would be against these programs existing in the first place so no thanks. I just want the programs to be run better and I think a competent government could achieve this.

[SuzerainOfSwat]

I don’t know what a FAFSA is, but I believe it should be as easy-peasy like the GI Bill:

The initial pain-in-the-ass is going to your Veterans Affairs Office on your campus to to begin with (which, for me, took like 4 months to initialize)

And after that, simply self-certify every month online and then see those phat checks hit your account.

Still in, but is it really that bad? From dudes I know that got out and are using/used their GI bill it seemed like a pretty easy situation. Maybe you just got unlucky. What time period was this?

[beaver2.0]

Has anyone here had firsthand experience with the new form? Is it as bad as the reporting suggests?

Not firsthand experience, but a family member of mine is helping a neighbor with taxes. This involves FAFSA. Apparently, they spent hours on multiple occasions with a DoE rep on the phone because they were having issues submitting the form. It turns out the FAFSA doesn't work well with Macs. The DoE rep admitted as much. Based on that, I can only imagine how much of a mess this new form is.

[walleye26]

When I applied to college in 2014 the FAFSA form was a real pain to fill out. However, I think the reason now we are seeing such a drop is the job market. Some of the high schoolers I teach don’t plan on going to college because all the manufacturing jobs here in central Wisconsin are paying $18-24. That’s insanely good money for rural Wisconsin, and many of them are of the idea they will live with parents for a year or two and save up $50-$60,000 and have no college debt. With the overtime many companies are willing to pay, I’m all for it.

[quesaisje]

Long article from The Atlantic:

For years, Senator Lamar Alexander was known for theatrically unfurling a paper document so long that he could hold it above his head and still see it drag along the chamber floor. [...] In December 2020, on the eve of Alexander’s retirement, Congress finally passed legislation to simplify the form, with implementation ultimately scheduled for the high-school class of 2024. It was a rare win for bipartisan, commonsense governance: less paperwork, more kids going to college.

That was the idea, anyway. In practice, seemingly every phase of the implementation has gone wrong; an ostensible process of simplification has made enrolling in college much harder. And while the government scrambles to fix the problems it created, time is running out for an entire nation’s worth of high-school seniors. The effect on college attendance threatens to be even worse than the coronavirus pandemic was.

To sum up:

• Biden admin / Secretary Cardona touts the change as a bipartisan achievement, a win for students, and a top priority for the Ed Dept
• Form goes live three months later than usual, after Christmas
• Form crashes almost immediately and isn't up reliably for a week
• Form still doesn't work correctly for many (mysterious glitches abound, students get locked out, form rejects responses that should be valid)
• As a result of these errors, the help line melts down
• Ed Dept pushes back its deadline for submitting the data to colleges by two months on the day before it usually goes out
• With the end of March approaching, they still haven't processed half of those forms
• Some colleges have begun receiving information, but it's riddled with errors (at least 10% of applications processed so far, by the Ed Dept's recognition)
• These errors won't be corrected until mid-April (probably an optimistic timeline given everything else)
• All of this is running up against the usual May deadline that colleges set for making regular enrollment decisions

Here is another scathing detail that wasn't apparent in earlier reporting: Congress couldn't reach a deal on providing more resources for this transition in the 2023 budget season.

During the 2023 budget process, Congress appeared ready to give the department more money. But the effort became snarled in the politics of student-loan forgiveness. Republicans reportedly offered funding to hire new staff, but demanded that the money not be used for student-debt cancellation. Democrats rejected the deal.

Here is what is most concerning to college administrators:

According to Bill DeBaun, the senior director of data and strategic initiatives at the National College Attainment Network, 31 percent fewer high-school seniors have submitted the FAFSA compared with this time last year—a potentially missing cohort of 600,000 students. That’s a larger decline than occurred in any year during the pandemic, and it’s disproportionately clustered among schools with high shares of low-income students, the exact people who are least likely to go to college without financial aid. Another 2 million adults, mostly current college and graduate students, have yet to apply for the upcoming academic year.

So what we're potentially looking at is a bureaucratic mistake creating the largest ever setback to college admissions for low-income students.

This comes on top of unfavorable demographic trends, declining trust in institutions of higher education, and an incomplete recovery from diminished enrollment during the pandemic. A perfect storm.

[quesaisje]

UPDATE: The Hill reports that the Department of Education is now telling colleges to proceed with inaccurate information, a directive that poses obvious problems:

In the latest development, colleges have been told they are allowed to use faulty student data the department sent them, as long as the error means an applicant receives more federal aid than they qualify for, not less.

The green light to purposely process information that is incorrect is a huge concern for advocates, as it can put financial aid administrators in a sticky situation, especially at a time where reprocessing forms could mean students don’t receive the financial aid information they need until May.

“We want students to be able to get as much financial aid that they need, if they’re eligible. We want that absolutely 1,000 percent, right?” said Emmanual Guillory, senior director of government relations at the American Council on Education (ACE). “But at our institutions, this type information is audited. You don’t want to be on record literally processing information that’s inaccurate, knowingly processing inaccurate information.”

“And you’re doing a disservice to students if you give them the illusion that they’re eligible for more aid in one year, when really, they’re not,” Guillory added.

That last point is an excellent one. It's enough of a problem for many students that their aid can change unpredictably based on family circumstances that they have little to do with by the time they become upperclassmen.

[dead0man]

is there anything the govt can't screw up?

[Libertas Vel Mors]

Great to hear that fewer young Americans are choosing to go to college. Hopefully we can return college/high school graduation rates to 1960s levels -- ideally replaced with aptitude tests, with college being used only for specific knowledge dissemination -- within our lifetimes.

Separately, we should of course eliminate all subsidies for colleges and universities, including subsidizing attendance.

[quesaisje]

Great to hear that fewer young Americans are choosing to go to college. Hopefully we can return college/high school graduation rates to 1960s levels -- ideally replaced with aptitude tests, with college being used only for specific knowledge dissemination -- within our lifetimes.

Separately, we should of course eliminate all subsidies for colleges and universities, including subsidizing attendance.

More students choosing to do something else is one thing, but that's distinct from not going because the government screwed up your aid application. That's not something to celebrate unless you're cheering on the decay of complex systems in general.

[Libertas Vel Mors]

Great to hear that fewer young Americans are choosing to go to college. Hopefully we can return college/high school graduation rates to 1960s levels -- ideally replaced with aptitude tests, with college being used only for specific knowledge dissemination -- within our lifetimes.

Separately, we should of course eliminate all subsidies for colleges and universities, including subsidizing attendance.

More students choosing to do something else is one thing, but that's distinct from not going because the government screwed up your aid application. That's not something to celebrate unless you're cheering on the decay of complex systems in general.

I suspect that there are both fewer students choosing to go to college and a worse FAFSA form. The two are not contradictory -- in fact, they may be complementary in that a student who is only so-so on going to college may have less of an impulse to struggle through the form than that same student would be was he certain that he wanted to go to college.

[jojoju1998]

Great to hear that fewer young Americans are choosing to go to college. Hopefully we can return college/high school graduation rates to 1960s levels -- ideally replaced with aptitude tests, with college being used only for specific knowledge dissemination -- within our lifetimes.

Separately, we should of course eliminate all subsidies for colleges and universities, including subsidizing attendance.

US high schools have eliminated vocational tracks since the 1960s. If you want to do that; you have to bring back the tracking system or at least specialized pathways in high schools, ( which most other countries already do by the way, the German System for example.).

[Libertas Vel Mors]

Great to hear that fewer young Americans are choosing to go to college. Hopefully we can return college/high school graduation rates to 1960s levels -- ideally replaced with aptitude tests, with college being used only for specific knowledge dissemination -- within our lifetimes.

Separately, we should of course eliminate all subsidies for colleges and universities, including subsidizing attendance.

US high schools have eliminated vocational tracks since the 1960s. If you want to do that; you have to bring back the tracking system or at least specialized pathways in high schools, ( which most other countries already do by the way, the German System for example.).

Frankly, I don't want organized high schools. I think we can and should prefer home schooling and online education for the majority of instruction (graduate schools are probably necessary for some professions, ie law or medicine), and see little reason to preserve lower level schools. But if we must have schools, I certainly support aptitude-based tracking, if done well (ie, on the basis of IQ) and not merely as a test of sitzfleisch.

[dead0man]

WV declares state of emergency over FAFSA

Amid ongoing problems with the U.S. Department of Education’s rollout of a new Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) for students applying for financial aid for college this fall, Gov. Jim Justice announced today he has temporarily suspended the requirement for students to complete the FAFSA in order to qualify for the state’s largest financial aid programs.

The FAFSA is the key to unlocking financial aid for college, as it determines a student’s financial need. The federal government unveiled a new FAFSA at the beginning of this year, but the move to the new form has been a significant challenge for students and families across West Virginia and the nation. Ongoing problems with the form are preventing many high school seniors from applying for financial aid at all. In West Virginia, high school FAFSA completion rates are currently down nearly 40 percent. 

[dead0man]

don't worry (you clearly aren't), Democrats do what Democrats do to all broken govt programs, give them more money

The U.S. Department of Education (Department) today announced additional steps to support students and their families with the Better FAFSA. The Department is launching a multi-million-dollar program as part of the FAFSA Student Support Strategy to help school districts, state, nonprofits and other public and private organizations with efforts to boost FAFSA completion. Since the new 2024–25 FAFSA form became available on Dec. 30, more than 8.95 million forms have been successfully submitted.

The FAFSA Student Support Strategy funds will help grow capacity for organizations to expand the availability of advisers, counselors, and coaches to support students and contributors through the FAFSA applications, including during extended hours through evenings, weekends, and the summer weeks. It will also facilitate FAFSA submission clinics, including through partnerships with schools and districts, and provide transportation support as needed. Additionally, these funds will provide communication supports to help organizations communicate with parents and students via text, phone calls, and videoconferences, in multiple languages as needed, to help them complete their forms.

The FAFSA Student Support Strategy aims to continue increasing the number of high school students who complete a 2024-25 FAFSA and enroll in college, particularly first-time college students and students of color. This investment builds on the Department’s efforts to help students, families, and institutions through the 2024-25 FAFSA application cycle, in addition to the College Support Strategy, the FAFSA Fast Break campaign, and direct communication efforts with institutions and stakeholders via the FAFSA Fast News blog.

you'll note that they aren't even saying they are going to fix the broken system, just pay more people to guide students and others through the process

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

I am gonna help my cuz in TX , when I finish Law school, but College is like a HS Diploma now that everyone has it, a Degree and if you know someone who can help you with getting a job or have inheritance to get into an Ivy League school you will be resorting to Minimum skilled jobs.

I came out of college getting a HS diploma job