(Bloomberg) — After one of the more chaotic application seasons sometimesmillions of students and their families are now choosing colleges without knowing how much it will cost cost actually.
In a normal year, universities send financial aid offers immediately after the release of acceptance letters. But after several delays related to renewing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, millions of families are preparing to make a financial commitment without key information at a time when the cost of college THERE never higher.
That's the case for Ayush Natarajan, a high school senior from Southern California who wants to study neuroscience and is mostly deciding between the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles.
For him, financial aid will be the “tie breaker,” with USC's sticker price at about $95,000 a year compared to UCLA's in-state tuition of about $42,000. But he still hasn't received any information about financial aid.
“You do all the work in applying to these schools and fill out the essays, take the tests, get the grades and submit your application waiting to get a decision,” Natarajan said. “And with all the FAFSA delays, I think you're basically not getting a full decision. You're getting an acceptance or rejection or waitlist, but you're not getting that peace of mind that will allow you to commit to one of those schools.
Major overhaul
below FAFSA Simplification Actpassed in December 2020, the application for federal aid was subjected to one of major repairs in decades with the goal of simplifying the process and increasing access to assistance for low-income families. But a botched submission — in which the Department of Education was unable to get the forms to college financial aid offices in time — has made the process even more stressful for many students and their families this year.
Universities only began receiving completed forms from the Department of Education in mid-March, and now some institutions, including the University of California system and Amherst College, are pushing their decision deadlines back from the usual May 1 date. However, most elite private institutions aren't dedicated to their deadlines, which means students likely don't have a complete financial picture when making their college decision.
Read more: Financial aid renewal rollout leaves students in the lurch
Earlier this week, the Department of Education said it had processed almost all of the approximately 6.6 million FAFSA forms it had received this year. In a typical year, schools would have started receiving forms in October, said Karen McCarthy, a vice president at National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. She said the concern now is that schools have much less time to evaluate FAFSA forms and that students will have aid offers from some colleges but not others when they reach decision deadlines.
“We want students to be able to make a fully informed decision,” McCarthy said. “We fear that it will ultimately disproportionately affect middle- and low-income students who need that information to make a decision. These students in particular are really being forgotten.”
Widening inequality
The impact of FAFSA delays will be felt most at institutions that rely solely on federal aid. Institutions with large endowments such as Stanford University and Brown University, which use the CSS Profile, an additional online application to grant non-federal institutional aid, are finding solutions.
Students who applied to Stanford, for example, received financial aid offers using only institutional funds, said Karen Cooper, the school's director of financial aid. Then, after the university evaluates its FAFSA forms, it will replace some of the scholarship funds with federal aid — but the total net cost to students will remain the same. As a result, Stanford has not moved their decision date from May 1st.
“It's been shocking that it's been so much work and taken so long,” Cooper said. “We assumed we'd start getting FAFSA right after they started getting applications in January. And so it's been a real struggle.”
The online FAFSA application, which normally opens in October, was supposed to go out in December for those applying for aid in the 2024-2025 academic year. But when it launched, users reported crashes and random exits, causing data loss. As recently as January, the app was available online 24/7.
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For Alex Lumala, a high school senior from Scottsdale, Arizona, who will be the first in his family to attend college, the application process was already confusing before the FAFSA delays. Now, he's worried he'll make the wrong choice without knowing the full financial picture of his options.
He would prefer to study computer science at one of the most elite universities he has been accepted to: University of Massachusetts Amherst, Purdue University, and Georgia Institute of Technology. But since he hasn't received his financial aid packages yet, he thinks he will most likely attend Arizona State University's Barrett Honors College, where he received a full tuition scholarship.
“Overall, I am very frustrated with the Department of Education's performance with the FAFSA and how these delays most affect first-generation and low-income students, the exact group that was supposed to benefit from this FAFSA fix ,” Lumala said. “I know ASU will be more affordable, but I wanted more.”
To contact the authors of this story:
Francesca Maglione in New York at (email protected)
Paulina Cachero in New York at (email protected)