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Thousands of Florida Students Struggle as College Financial Aid Gaps Grow
Destiny Obioha sat in class at Brandon High for weeks looking at his cell phone, with a headset in his ear, waiting for someone to answer his call. Instead of having lunch with friends, she would go to the library and start dialing.
Sometimes a federal student aid representative would answer, only to put her back on hold after explaining the situation. Her mother did not have access to the new federal aid application and was unable to enter the tax information Obioha needed to fill it out. Other times, the call simply dropped.
Obioha, 18, watched TikTok videos looking for someone with the same problem.
Even after managing to unblock her mother’s account, she still doesn’t know exactly how much she will have to pay for school – with less than two months left until her first summer term at Florida International University.
More than 50,000 Florida high school seniors have played the same tense waiting game as the failed implementation of the federal form continues. At the end of April, applications for federal aid remained down by about a third. last year, according to a Tampa Bay Times analysis of U.S. Department of Education data.
But that number doesn’t tell the whole story.
Thousands of applications contained errors that made it impossible for university administrators to make offers of help to prospective students. Thousands more were rejected due to missing or conflicting information, leaving students scrambling to review applications in time for looming application deadlines.
The combination of late submissions, rejected applications and miscalculated results means that completed and usable applications are down at least 35% in Florida compared with last year, a Times analysis found.
Various errors
During a congressional hearing last month, Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said that about 1 in 5 applications for federal aid were miscalculated by the Department of Education. Another 1 in 5 lack the information needed to calculate school financial aid.
That represents 40% of applications that were “dead in the water” just weeks before students made their fall enrollment decisions, he told members of the House education and workforce committee.
Their numbers are in line with what administrators have seen at the University of South Florida, where more than a third of applications are unusable, said Billie Jo Hamilton, associate vice president for student enrollment.
About half of them were rife with errors and miscalculations in the federal formula used to determine financial need, Hamilton said.
The University of South Florida is among a handful of state schools that have pushed back the enrollment deadline to May 15 after problems with the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. More than a third of school financial aid applications are unusable due to errors, delays, and other problems. [ DIRK SHADD | Times (2022) ]
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Since its launch, the application, known as FAFSA, has been plagued with bugs and outdated data, which the Department of Education is often slow to resolve.
In December, student aid expert Mark Kantrowitz highlighted how the department failed to account for three years of inflation. He estimated that failure would cost the average family about $1,600 in aid.
After refusing to make the inflation adjustment of around 18%, the department announced in mid January that would recalculate estimates of students’ financial needs, delaying the delivery of financial data by up to six weeks.
In March, federal education officials announced another error in the funding formula. Their model omitted some student assets from consideration and erroneously inflated the financial need of more than 200,000 students nationally.
The department began returning reprocessed applications to university administrators on April 29, James Kvaal, the U.S. deputy secretary of education, said. said last week.
This happened just days before many schools, including the University of North Florida and Florida Polytechnic University, required students to decide their enrollment for the fall.
“How do you end up with a system where 20% of students get the formula wrong?” Kantrowitz said. “The fact that this issue was not noticed suggests to me that they did not have a testing system in place.”
Instead, it’s up to students and college aid administrators to check the department’s calculations and flag errors. Many of the errors were first identified by students and school administrators, who found discrepancies in the government’s math, Kantrowitz said.
The constant delays and problematic data have created unprecedented demand on workers who provide financial aid to schools, said Jill Desjean, senior policy analyst at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.
Typically, administrators would have their federal aid applications in good shape by mid-October, Desjean said.
“Staff are being asked to cut six months of work into just a few weeks,” she said. “This never happened before.”
In January, a group of Republican lawmakers asked for an investigation on the app’s rocky launch and whether the Department of Education did enough to support students and school administrators.
Last week, the Biden administration’s top student aid officialRichard A. Cordray, announced that he will step down in June as a result of the mismanaged launch.
A flawed design
This year’s candidacy creates the potential for a maze of errors that could lead to a rejected candidacy, said Desjean, the political analyst.
At Florida State University, 1 in 5 applications was rejected due to missing or incorrect information, spokeswoman Amy Patronis said. This is on top of the 50% drop in applications the university received last year.
Statewide, the share of incomplete applications nearly doubled. Every year, around 7% of students who submit an application never correct the rejected application. At the end of April, more than 7,000 students still had unresolved errors on their applications — representing about 13% of applications, according to the Times’ analysis of federal data.
There are several reasons why an order may be rejected. Tax information pulled from the IRS may not match, a question about citizenship or marital status may have been left blank.
One of the most common mistakes this year is missing a signature, Desjean said. If a parent or student signed the form and closed the form to return to it later, their signature would be deleted and they would not be asked to sign again before submitting, per department instructions. problem database.
Desjean said she is also concerned about the higher number of students opting out of financial aid. It’s a rarely used option designed for students whose parents are unwilling to submit their portion of the application, she said.
“This suggests to me that the question was poorly written,” Desjean said. “Students made mistakes because of departmental mistakes. If the form was better designed, we wouldn’t see this.”
Students were informed via email that their application was rejected, sometimes within days of submission, according to the agency.
In previous years, errors were easily correctable. The new federal aid portal, however, blocked students and families from accessing their application once it was submitted. The department did not change the application page to allow for revisions until the end of April.
The Department of Education has processed about 1 million corrections, said Kvaal, the undersecretary, but a worrying number of forms are still incomplete. He encouraged students who have not yet applied for federal aid to do so immediately, adding that turnaround times range from one to three days.
Senior department officials announced Tuesday that students from mixed-status families — where at least one parent does not have legal permanent residency — would be able to submit an application using manually entered tax information. The fix addresses a complaint raised weeks after the app launched in January.
Some Florida universities — including USF, the University of Florida and the University of Central Florida — have postponed the application deadline to May 15.
Florida State University moved the deadline to June 1, spokeswoman Anna Prentiss said. The school plans to send out financial awards by this week.
But that may be too soon for many families, said Kantrowitz, the student advocate.
“Some students probably won’t even have offers until May 1,” he said. “They will not have time to make decisions or appeal the decision. It’s not realistic.”
Obioha, the Brandon High student, finally received her financial aid estimate in late March. It was less than she expected. She wondered: Could she be one of the thousands of students whose applications were miscalculated? It’s unlikely she will have time to appeal the number before starting college.
In the remaining weeks of his senior year, Obioha will balance studying for finals with applying for every scholarship he can find, with the help of Brandon High’s new college and career center.
She hopes to cover enough of her tuition and living expenses to avoid taking on student debt.
Was the anxiety worth it?
“Of course,” she replied sternly. “The value of independence is immeasurable.”
Furthermore, she added, she already I zoomed in on your future roommates and they seem really cool.
Ian Hodgson is an education data reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, working in partnership with Open Campus.