‘We’re like dust to them’: FAFSA glitches put Texas students’ college dreams in limbo

At least once a day for about the past month and a half, StephaniLopez has called a phone hotline set up to help students who are having trouble applying for federal financial aid. Each time, she gets a recorded message saying the waiting queue is full, and the call ends.

Lopez, a senior at Sam Houston High School in the Arlington Independent School District, has been working with counselors for months to fill out college applications and get everything ready to apply for financial aid. But when the time came to apply, a glitch in the newly redesigned Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, blocked Lopez from completing her application.

Making matters even more complicated, when she calls the U.S. Department of Education’s number to get help, she often hears a recorded message warning her of hours-long wait times. Sometimes, the call ends without any explanation.

Lopez was born in Fort Worth, but her parents are undocumented immigrants from Mexico. In years past, parents without Social Security numbers were able to fill out their portions of the FAFSA by using a work-around. But following a redesign that was meant to simplify the application, undocumented parents are locked out of the online form. Education Department officials have said they’re aware of the problem and working on a solution, but no timeline for the fix has been announced.

“It kind of hurts, because I also want to pursue my education. I want to help my family financially,” Lopez said. “But with this, it kind of is a stab in the back, in a way.”

FAFSA snafu causes headaches for applicants

Federal education officials unveiled the newly redesigned FAFSA late last year. The remodel was required under the FAFSA Simplification Act, passed in 2020. The new form is designed to be simpler and more user-friendly, paring questions down to fewer than 20 instead of more than 100. The department is also expanding the way it calculates aid eligibility, expanding access to Pell Grants. Education officials have estimated about 50,000 more Texas students will receive Pell Grant money following the change, and about 132,000 more Texas students will receive the maximum award.

But the rollout of the new application has been rocky. The Education Department didn’t open the new form online until Dec. 31, about two months after families typically get access to the FAFSA. That delay put pressure on high school counselors, who now have to help an entire year’s worth of students complete the form in about three months.

Then, late last month, federal education officials announced colleges and universities wouldn’t receive completed applications until early March — more than a month after they typically receive them. That delay leave colleges with a narrower window to put together financial aid packages and send them out to families.

For students, those delays could mean less time to compare student aid offers and make a decision. Historically, most colleges have used May 1, often known as National College Decision Day, as the deadline for students to make a final decision about where they’ll enroll. But because of the delays, most students might not get financial aid offer letters until April, leaving them only a few weeks to decide.

Last week, federal education officials announced plans to deploy dozens of financial aid experts to under-resourced institutions, including historically Black colleges and universities and tribal schools, over the next few weeks. The department will also send $50 million to education nonprofits that offer technical assistance with the financial aid process to help ease the burden of the delays.

The rollout has left families with widely divergent experiences with the application. Because of the simplification, some families are able to get through the application in as little as 10 minutes. But others, including those in which parents don’t have Social Security numbers, haven’t been able to submit the form at all. On a call with journalists Monday, a senior Department of Education official said the department hopes to have the problem fixed “in the coming weeks.” In the meantime, families who haven’t been able to submit their applications online can still submit a paper application by mail, the official said.

Arlington students shut out of FAFSA due to glitch

Lopez, the Sam Houston senior, will be the first in her family to go to college. Her parents told her from a young age that they expected her to pursue education beyond high school, she said. But she also knew they wouldn’t be able to help her much financially.

That means Lopez’s choice of college will largely depend on how much financial aid she gets. Lopez is in the top 6% of her graduating class, meaning she gets automatic acceptance to the University of Texas at Austin. But being accepted into a college isn’t the same as being able to pay to go there.

If she’s shut out of the financial aid application process this year, Lopez said she’ll most likely have to start at Tarrant County College instead of a four-year university. The community college is cheaper per credit hour, and she could save money by living at home, she said. But she worries that starting at TCC would mean she wouldn’t get a full college experience.

Zayra Quiroz, another Sam Houston senior, said she’s had the same experience as Lopez. She was born in Dallas, but her parents are undocumented, which means she hasn’t been able to submit the application. She also hasn’t been able to get help through the department’s hotline, despite calling several times a day for weeks.

Quiroz has applied to several schools across Texas, including Texas Christian University and Southern Methodist University. She plans to study business, but her biggest dream is finding a way to help her community after college. Her neighborhood doesn’t feel safe, she said, and she’d like to be a part of the solution to that problem. But she said student aid will be critical to making those dreams a reality.

“It’s important to me because I come from a struggling family. My family came from nothing, literally,” she said. “I don’t have that kind of money in my pocket.”

Botched FAFSA rollout delays financial aid apps for hundreds

Cynthia Carter, a counselor at Sam Houston High School, said the school would typically have about 200 applications submitted by the second week of February. This year, just 81 of the school’s seniors had sent off applications by then.

In the past, when the FAFSA opened in October, counselors would immediately begin working with “early-action” students — high-achieving students who would be applying to competitive schools, Carter said. Within a week or two, those students had their paperwork submitted, she said, and they only had to wait for award letters to arrive in the spring.

But this year, the delayed release of the new application pushed that timeline back by a few months. So students who would otherwise have had everything submitted by the end of October were only getting started with it in January, Carter said.

“We’re crunching months worth of work into this small timeframe,” she said.

But even after students had access to the form, most had a difficult time with it, Carter said. A large percentage of the students at Sam Houston were born in the United States to undocumented parents, she said. The glitch in the application is affecting hundreds of families at Sam Houston alone, she said, to say nothing of all the other high schools across Texas.

For first-generation college students, the main factor dictating where they go to school, or even if they do at all, is usually money, Carter said. She worries many of her seniors will be forced to settle for something less than they’re capable of because they don’t have access to financial aid. She’s seen how much of a difference that money made for other students of limited means who went on to be successful at top-tier universities.

“I have kids at Yale, I have kids at Harvard, I have kids at TCU, I have kids all over the place that can do it,” she said. “And they do it because of the financial assistance that follows them, because they’ve worked hard.”

Carter said she’s especially worried about students who still need help after the end of the school year. Normally, there are a few college advisers on hand to help any students who still have questions during the summer, she said, but they generally only have to work with a small handful of students who have quick follow-up questions. This year, students may still be getting award letters after they leave for the summer, and Carter said many of them will need help making sense of them.

Carter said she’s already looking for ways to provide that support over the summer. Ideally, those are plans school leaders would have made months ago, she said. But even with short notice and limited resources, she’s determined to find a way to make it work.

“If I have to pull it off, I will pull it off,” she said. “It’ll happen, because it has to happen for kids.”

Department of Education staffers struggle to help

Whitney Sanchez, a member of TCU’s College Advising Corps, said the redesigned form is much quicker and more accessible than the old one — but only for certain kinds of families.

“If you have parents who are married and they file taxes jointly and they live happily ever after, you can get in and out of that form in about 10-15 minutes. It’s great,” she said.

Sanchez, who works with students and parents at North Crowley High School in Crowley ISD, said that isn’t the case for most of the families she works with. Some kids don’t live with their parents. Some parents don’t have Social Security numbers. One student’s mother remarried recently, and her new husband is undocumented, Sanchez said. The girl’s new stepfather isn’t a major parental figure in her life, Sanchez said, but the fact that he doesn’t have a Social Security number is still locking the family out of the FAFSA.

Anytime Sanchez calls the Department of Education’s hotline to get guidance on how to handle a situation, it seems everyone there is struggling as much as she is, she said. The staffers she talks to seem like they want to be helpful, she said, but they don’t have answers.

“You’re supposed to be able to call that number and get assistance and get some guidance,” she said. “And they’re at a loss, as well.”

FAFSA delays force colleges to adjust

The delays are forcing colleges and universities across the country to shift their timelines for handling financial aid requests. Karen Krause, executive director of financial aid at the University of Texas at Arlington, said that in a typical year, financial aid staffers would already have processed thousands of FAFSA records and notified students if they needed any additional information. The university usually begins sending out award letters to incoming freshmen in late February, she said. This year, those letters likely won’t go out until early April, she said.

Although the university hasn’t pushed back the May 1 deadline for making a commitment, Krause said that deadline isn’t as hard and fast as it once was. The university will accommodate students who need extra time because of the delays, she said. She emphasized that no student will need to defer their college plans because of the new timeline.

“We are going to work with students and families to make this as painless as possible, even though it is later than it typically is,” she said.

David Ximenez, associate vice chancellor for enrollment and academic support services at TCC, said in a typical year, financial aid staffers would be getting ready to send out award letters about now. But because of the delays, students won’t receive those offers for a few months.

It generally takes the college about two months to load students’ FAFSA data into its student information system and calculate how much financial aid each will be eligible for, Ximenez said. There’s no way to speed that process up to make up for time lost to the delays, he said, so instead of sending award letters to students in February or March, as the community college district typically does, officials are expecting to send them out in May or June.

Ximenez said there will likely be some colleges around the country that use other models to try to put together an estimate of the amount of financial aid students might receive, and send out tentative award letters earlier. But for most colleges, including TCC, there are few options other than sending out award letters later than they’d like.

Financial aid delays put students’ college plans in limbo

Lopez, the Sam Houston senior, isn’t giving up on her college dreams. She’s applied to TCU, the University of Texas at Austin and a handful of other schools. She’s dreamed of going to TCU since she was in middle school, she said, but she’s keeping other options open.

Lopez wants to major in business management, and hopes to start her own business after she graduates. But being able to pursue those dreams depends on student aid, she said, and that depends on being able to fill out the FAFSA.

The situation has left Lopez frustrated. She knows there are thousands of other students like her, whose college dreams are in limbo. Having seen the way they’ve handled the rollout of the new FAFSA, she said she doesn’t feel like federal education officials are interested in helping.

“It kind of feels like we’re not a priority to them — like we’re like dust to them, kind of,” Lopez said. “I don’t feel like they really care about students that have undocumented parents.”