Alexis Catalan, a high school senior in San Jose, was one of the lucky ones. She submitted her Free Application for Federal Student Aid a few weeks after the application launched in December and only experienced a handful of glitches with the online form.
Catalan applied to 16 schools, and her preferred option is the University of San Francisco to pursue a degree in medicine. But three months later, she’s still waiting to find out how much financial aid she’ll receive. And as the college decision deadline rapidly approaches, Catalan might have to decide which school she’ll attend in the fall, before she’ll truly know if she can afford it.
Alexis Catalan, 17, left, and Lilia Rodriguez Vargas, 17, right, talk about their experience applying for FAFSA, Federal Association of Financial Services, at Lincoln High School in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday, April 18, 2024. (Shae Hammond/Bay Area News Group)
“Even though (schools) have received my FAFSA, they’re not able to tell me much about what my financial aid will look like,” said Catalan, who is graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School. “It’s difficult to try and figure out how I would be able to go to the university based off the unknowns from the FAFSA. … Financial aid is a big question mark for me.”
Catalan is one of thousands of students in the Bay Area still waiting to receive financial aid packages thanks to this year’s botched revamp of the federal financial aid process. The number of completed applications has dropped by 36% across the country, compared to last year, not long before schools’ enrollment deadlines.
When the Department of Education released an overhaul of the federal aid application for the first time in more than 40 years, the hope was that it would make it easier for students to apply and qualify for college financial aid.
What followed was a bureaucratic nightmare. Colleges and universities didn’t begin receiving students’ FAFSA information from the Department of Education until late March. And additional errors in calculations meant hundreds of thousands of already-submitted forms would need to be reprocessed.
Since January, more than 30 issues have been reported with the new application. And less than a month before students are expected to declare which schools they plan on attending, more than a dozen problems remain. What’s more, many students have still not been able to submit their applications.
Bellarmine College Preparatory senior Joshua Hernandez-Alvarado at his school on Friday, April, 26, 2024, in San Jose, Calif. While the FAFSA delay continues, he is still waiting for financial aid offers from five other universities. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
Joshua Hernandez-Alvarado, a senior at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, opened his FAFSA application in early January with the expectation it would take him a little over an hour to complete.
But when it came time to wrap up his application and choose which schools to send his financial aid information to, he hit an error. A glitch in the system had submitted his FAFSA before he had completed it.
Panicked about how the delay would impact his financial aid packages from potential schools, Hernandez-Alvarado called the FAFSA helpline only to be left on hold for hours at a time. He said when he was finally able to speak with a representative, they told him they were working to fix the glitch and he would be able to edit his application “soon.”
“It just almost felt like being ghosted,” Hernandez-Alvarado said. “There was a lot of mystery in what would happen next week. Would we ever be able to edit it? Would we need to do a different application? So for a long, long period of time, students — including myself — were wondering what was going to happen next.”
Bellarmine College Preparatory senior Joshua Hernandez-Alvarado holds letters of acceptance that he received without full financial aid offers due to the delay in FAFSA processing on Friday, April 26, 2024. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
The high volume of technical errors and weeks-long delay meant Hernandez-Alvarado wasn’t able to correct and submit his application until last week.
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“It’s really cutting it close to the point where I submitted my application for FAFSA less than a month before I need to decide where I’m going to spend my next four years,” Hernandez-Alvarado said. “You would think after getting it done, I’m all calm and relaxed. But the reality is it’s just the beginning. It feels like a never-ending cycle.”
Angela, a Piedmont Hills High School senior whose last name is not being used because her parent is undocumented, created her FAFSA account in February. She filled out the entire application and was ready to submit, she just needed her mom to create an account and provide her signature. But that revealed another error with the FAFSA revamp: parents without a Social Security number couldn’t contribute to the form.
Angela then tried to submit an alternative California Dream Act Application offered by the California Student Aid Commission for students experiencing difficulties applying for aid through FAFSA. But she couldn’t complete that application either, because her social security number was already in the federal aid pipeline.
Although Angela was able to work with FAFSA helpline representatives to verify her mother’s account, another FAFSA error involving miscalculations in financial need data sent to schools had to be corrected.
“I thought it was going to go so smoothly. I was going to finish on time,” she said. “It was definitely very stressful. … I had to go through so much just to get close to completing it.”
Even students who are not as dependent on FAFSA said the delays have caused unnecessary stress and impacted their college decision timelines.
Srinikesh Kanneluru, a senior at California High School in San Ramon, said he was able to complete his financial aid application with no errors or delays. He committed to Purdue University last week, but he said he’s still waiting on his official financial aid offer.
“Financial aid is not going to make such a huge difference (for me),” Kanneluru said. “It would take a huge amount of money, especially if you’re doing out-of-state tuition … and I don’t really see that (happening). It really depends, until the offers come out.”
But with a May 15 deadline looming to accept an offer from most University of California or California State University schools, some students say the amount of aid they receive means everything.
Alexis Catalan, 17, left, and Lilia Rodriguez Vargas, 17, right, talk about their experience applying for FAFSA, Federal Association of Financial Services, at Lincoln High School in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday, April 18, 2024. (Shae Hammond/Bay Area News Group)
“Two weeks! I was already freaking out because I have to decide … where I’m going to be for four years and … what I’m going to be doing,” said Lilia Rodriguez Vargas, a senior at Abraham Lincoln High School in San Jose. “It’s a huge decision. I’m a first-generation (college student) so I want to set a great example for my family, for my younger sisters … and if I make this decision, what if I go into debt? What if this isn’t the place I want to be?”
She was able to successfully complete her FAFSA at the end of March but is still waiting to receive her aid packages. Now she’s considering going to community college, which would be tuition-free under the California College Promise Program.
Hernandez-Alvarado said his dreams of attending school in Hawaii or Oregon were dashed when he realized the financial aid delays meant he wouldn’t know if he’d be able to afford the out-of-state tuition in time to enroll.
“FAFSA is supposed to be a system in which you can rely on to help handle the situation, help guide you,” Hernandez-Alvarado said. “We thought we were going to be able to submit quickly and get it out of the way and wait for our exciting news about where we’re going to go to school.”