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lpeterson@aspentimes.com
When Ashley Perez, a senior at Aspen High School, found out she was accepted to her dream culinary school in New York, she declined her acceptance because her Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) had not been processed, and the deadline for enrollment was rapidly approaching.
“I just couldn’t accept them because I knew if there was any possibility that FAFSA was not going to work this year for my freshman year, I couldn’t take out a $50,000 or more loan, with all the travel expenses, just for me to go to college for one year,” she said. “I can’t do that to myself, and I can’t do that to my parents, so I had to look at in-state schools.”
She is one of thousands of high school seniors across the nation who were burned by the federal government’s new FAFSA rollout. In December 2020, Congress passed the FAFSA Simplification Act, which required the Department of Education to introduce an improved FAFSA that was meant to make the notoriously complicated aid application simpler and quicker to complete.
But a botched rollout and several delays in processing left thousands of students across the country with unanswered questions and unprocessed aid packages that, for some students, proved consequential in determining what colleges they would attend in the fall.
The FAFSA typically opens on Oct. 1 every year. Instead, this year it was “soft launched” on Dec. 1 and fully opened on Jan. 1, and problems arose immediately. For Perez, her application took months to fill out because of complications with creating accounts for herself and her parents.
She has an older brother who went through the FAFSA process when he applied to college, and she knew how important completing the application was, she said. But she was left in the dark for months while her application sat unprocessed.
She was told the problems would be ironed out by mid-March. As she was receiving acceptance letters from schools, March and April passed without word about her application.
She spoke with post-secondary counselors at Aspen High School and FAFSA experts at Colorado Mountain College (CMC) for advice, but much of the advice boiled down to having to wait for the problems at the federal level to be solved.
“Not knowing whether schools or scholarships would wait for me and knowing that basically my future is riding on FAFSA … It’s just a bit hard,” Perez said. “I just felt so much anguish and pain in it because — for not only me, but a lot of kids’ opportunities all over this country — college rides on FAFSA, and not being able to do that is really scary.
“I had to take a risk and say ‘Yes’ to my school, saying, ‘Yes, I will attend,’ not knowing if I’m able to fully pay for it,” she added.
A failed rollout
The FAFSA is used to determine students’ eligibility for the federal Pell grant, is required to receive federal student loans, and is also used by colleges and states to distribute their own scholarships.
The first FAFSA applications in December were incorrectly processed using an outdated calculation for inflation. Some applications were submitted automatically before students could add their signatures or other final details. And hundreds of thousands of students who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents but whose parents are not were locked out of the system.
Traditionally, students must commit to a college by putting down a deposit by May 1. Some schools pushed their decision deadlines back to May 15 or June 1 because of the FAFSA delays, but some stuck to the May 1 deadline. It forced students to either pay a non-refundable deposit for a school they may not be able to afford, or, like in Perez’ case, commit to a school that is safer financially but may not be their first choice for college.
About 50% of seniors at Aspen High School submitted a FAFSA, said Susanne Morrison, a post-secondary counselor at the high school. As of May 8, most students have received their aid packages after delays, but there are several who are still waiting.
“Families were waiting on these aid packages, and in many cases, they were created,” she said. “This whole round of system-generated corrections sort of changed the picture slightly for some families, so I would say the timing has been stressful, but I don’t think that means there’s less aid out there.”
Students who filled out the FAFSA will likely receive aid, but many of them will find out how much aid they will receive too late to decide on a school that wasn’t financially feasible before knowing their FAFSA package.
The Aspen School District partnered with CMC’s financial aid office to give families access to FAFSA experts as they navigated the application.
Many students were able to get support from the district and CMC as they completed their applications, Morrison said. And while the FAFSA delays left students wondering how much need-based federal aid they would receive, many were still able to receive merit-based scholarships, which do not rely on the FAFSA.
“With the rising cost of college, I think more and more of our families are concerned about what school is going to cost them, and so more families are interested in completing the FAFSA,” she said. “Some of these colleges can cost $95,000 — it’s a lot. But our students are very successful in securing merit aid offers … and those merit packages weren’t impacted by the FAFSA delays.”
Local resources are also contributing to nearly $400,000 in scholarships that will be dispersed directly to a student’s chosen institution, she added. More than 40 local businesses, organizations, and philanthropists contribute to a local scholarship program that connects Aspen High School seniors to thousands of dollars in scholarships. That money is not tied to FAFSA requirements, and about 60% of the senior class applied to those scholarships, she said.
‘Another opportunity taken away‘
Perez committed to Colorado State University, where she will major in exploratory studies.
As a first-generation student, she is excited to graduate high school and go to college. But between starting high school during the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic in fall 2020 to having to navigate a financial aid process that was out of control, she feels frustrated that things out of her control have contributed major stress in her high school life.
“It’s just knowing that my choices were limited — not because I wasn’t good enough but because sometimes life is unfair,” she said. “That was just a bit difficult to come to terms with and see another opportunity sort of taken away from me.”
Aspen High School will celebrate its seniors at a delayed decision day celebration on Friday, May 17. Seniors are typically asked to sport gear representing the college they committed to on what is considered the national decision day on May 1, but the high school pushed back the celebration to accommodate for late decisions due to FAFSA delays.
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