FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) recent issues have been troubling college students ever since they did the soft launch in December 2023. In December 2023, they were on the lookout for technical issues within the soft launch, which caused worry from students and parents as the last-minute altercation took place. The soft launch really made the process more difficult for parents and students because of the different times the “soft launch” was available.
Usually, FAFSA is released on Oct. 1, but not in 2023. The released form included a mistake that would have cost students $1.8 billion in federal student aid. The Education Department said, in January, they would fix the issue, but the fix only compounded the delays in sending student’s FAFSA data to schools. The technical issue with the form meant many non-citizens, or children of non-citizens, could not fill it out. Vanessa Cordova Ramirez is a U.S. citizen, but her mom is not. When they sat down to fill out the FAFSA earlier this year, the application did not go through. There are so many other students who are U.S. citizens, but their parents do not have a Social Security number.
Cordova Ramirez was in a financial aid limbo. She could not commit or put a deposit down anywhere without knowing how much financial aid she was getting from each school. Really, students are worried about whether they are going to receive anything, and what are these students supposed to do if they do not receive anything? How am I going to pay for everything? Am I going to get the career I want or even get into the school I want to go to? But after many attempts to submit the FAFSA, Cordova Ramirez got her form through in May.
NPR (National Public Radio) spoke with families, counselors and advocates who shared similar problems as Cordova Ramirez. Among those impacted are permanent residents, green card holders and undocumented parents without a Social Security number. Eric Hoover is a senior writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education and has been covering the FAFSA ordeal. He says there are still a lot of students experiencing issues with FAFSA, like low-income, first-generation students and, in many cases, students who were born in the U.S. but have parents who are undocumented. This also includes a huge swath of broadly defined middle-income students who have encountered problems with the FAFSA and who, in some cases, had to wait and wait and wait to get one aid offer or to get aid offers from all the colleges they were waiting to hear from so that they could sit down at the kitchen table with mom and dad and try to make an apples-to-apples comparison of their aid offers.
In many cases, without every last dollar that they will hope to receive, they will not be able to attend perhaps the college they genuinely wanted to attend, but, in some cases, any college at all.
Colleges are nervous about their enrollment numbers dropping, specifically at the many relatively small colleges that do not have gigantic endowments, as well as regional public institutions throughout the country. In some cases, the downstream effect of that enrollment shortfall could be budget cuts that really hurt pay or hiring freezes, and perhaps, you know, the worst kind of cuts that any college could make, which is to cut jobs. FAFSA is the key to college for many students. Most colleges do not have the resources to fill that gap in federal aid. The college officials want to hear that the students who still cannot get through and complete the federal aid form are not being ignored and that if there need to be more workarounds that enable the FAFSA saga of 2024 to subside, it needs to happen now.
In Birmingham, there is a last-dollar scholarship for students who go to city schools. This scholarship was made to help these students after their financial aid and scholarships have been disputed. That is when Birmingham Promise pays for the rest, but they do not pay for housing or your meal plan; they only cover the balance of your tuition and mandatory fees. Nevertheless, getting the Birmingham Promise scholarship is great to have because it covers the fall and spring semesters of your four years at any of the public colleges in Alabama.