In reporting this story, NPR spoke with households, counselors and advocates who shared related issues. Amongst these impacted are everlasting residents, inexperienced card holders or undocumented dad and mom with no Social Safety quantity.
Because the kind opened in January, Azer, Cordova Ramirez and her mother have tried to finish the web utility greater than 20 instances. Every time, they get the identical error message, directing them to a cellphone quantity for any questions.
“We’ve called the number. They don’t have any solutions for us,” says Azer. After they name, they get an automatic message that gives outdated and outdated info. When she’s fortunate sufficient to get a dwell individual on the road, typically after ready on maintain for hours, they inform her to strive filling out the shape once more later.
“Do you understand how frustrating that is?” she says. “You act like we have all the time in the world to just sit down and be like ‘Ah, time to apply for the FAFSA right now.”
Following NPR’s reporting, the U.S. Schooling Division stated it was conscious of the issue and that employees had been assembly every day to resolve it. They beneficial that college students with dad and mom who aren’t residents ought to wait to fill out the shape on-line, however had been unable to offer any timeline for the repair.
It’s the newest in a sequence of issues with the FAFSA this 12 months. The shape rolled out months late, setting schools scrambling to get monetary assist packages out in time. Even with the additional time to get it right, NPR reported just lately on a technicality the division missed – probably costing college students virtually $2 billion.
Considerations about dangerous recommendation
The implications of this newest drawback are big, stopping households from getting important entry to cash for school, and even making knowledgeable enrollment choices about how a lot a school training will price them.
Within the meantime, there have been troubling experiences of doubtless dangerous workarounds – like asking college students to take images of their dad and mom’ passports and electronic mail them to the Ed Division.
“First of all, that assumes [the parents] have one,” says Invoice Brief, who runs a scholarship program for first-generation college students at Saint Lawrence College in Canton, N.Y. Past that, he provides, it raises severe considerations about on-line privateness:
“Emailing a sensitive document like that is about as insecure as it gets. You might as well make [the required paperwork] into a paper airplane and toss it out the window.”
The lengthy wait continues
The Schooling Division didn’t reply to repeated requests for touch upon the timetable for a repair, or in regards to the experiences of households being instructed to ship images of their passports via electronic mail.
In previous years, the final steering with FAFSA has been for college kids to finish it as quickly as potential. Amid the present delays, some universities have pushed again enrollment deadlines from the standard Might 1 to June 1, whereas others have made their deposits refundable.
In the meantime, the frustrations are mounting for college kids and their households as they watch “everybody else get a head start on you,” says Brief.
“You’re still standing in the starting line waiting for someone to say, ‘OK, now you can go,’ ” he provides. “Your perception is: ‘By the time I finally get there, they’re going to cross the finish line, and the money’s going to be gone.’ ”
Cordova Ramirez feels that frustration deeply.
“I have done everything,” she says. “I’ve taken the extracurriculars. I’ve tried to make a good application for myself for colleges to be like, ‘Yes, that’s someone we want.’”
Every single day, she asks herself the identical questions, again and again: “Am I going [to college] now? Am I going to the school that I want? Am I going to pursue the career that I want? Am I going to be something in life?”
Audio produced by: Janet Woojeong Lee and Mallory Yu
Edited by: Steve Drummond