When the process goes well, it typically takes 15 to 30 minutes for a student to complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. But, for Amy Carrillo-Rodriguez, it took four months.
Carrillo-Rodriguez is a U.S. citizen but her parents live in Mexico, a factor that was not an issue, until the federal government revised the FAFSA form late last year.
The FAFSA allows students to indicate that their parents did not file taxes in the U.S. because they earned income in the foreign country they live in. But when Carrillo-Rodriguez selected that option, the form continued asking questions about her parents’ U.S. income tax return — and she couldn’t skip to the next page.
Carrillo-Rodriguez got help filling out FAFSA — a form that helps determine a student’s eligibility for grants, scholarships, work-study programs and loans for college and trade school — from the Denver Scholarship Foundation, which spent the last 18 months trying to understand and untangle changes made to the form. The nonprofit has helped more than 4,000 Colorado students fill out the form and answer other financial aid questions this year.
“What we discovered, starting in January, was that nothing about the new FAFSA form has worked the way it was supposed to and we’ve tried to focus on tracking every development from the U.S. Department of Education, the national organizations we’re a part of and other resources to understand how to get around many of the issues students were having,” said Natasha Garfield, director of scholarships and financial aid at the Denver Scholarship Foundation.
When students complete the form, they get access to the largest source of financial aid for school.
Congress passed two laws in recent years — the FAFSA Simplification Act and the Future Act — which aimed to improve the complicated FAFSA process and many other financial aid-related things. But the revised FAFSA has been a headache, especially for students who are U.S. citizens but whose parents are undocumented or don’t have Social Security numbers and for students who have parents who didn’t file taxes in America.
Colorado lags behind most other U.S. states for the number of high school students who completed the FAFSA during the 2023-24 school year and there’s a troubling decline in FAFSA completion rates nationwide.
In the spring, students usually receive award letters from colleges that let them know how much financial aid they received. But this year, many colleges were delayed in getting those award letters to students because of the technical difficulties with the crucial form, including that the form opened Dec. 31 when it typically opens Oct. 1.
This left some students faced with making decisions about enrolling in school without key information about how much it would cost, Garfield said.
When students are awarded financial aid packages from colleges after filling out the FAFSA, they can compare the results side-by-side to understand which institution would give them the highest amount of financial and which school would be the best fit for them academically and financially, said Araceli Palacios, Denver Scholarship Foundation college advisor at the Future Center at Montbello High School, which helps students envision post-high school plans and achieve them.
College advisors like Palacios encourage students to submit their FAFSA as early as possible, because those who do, often get the biggest financial aid packages from schools. Submitting the form early also gives students enough time to apply for other scholarships if they need it, Palacios said.
Some students who don’t receive financial aid just decide not to enroll.
The revised FAFSA
The U.S. Department of Education reduced the number of questions on the revised FAFSA this past school year to make it easier to complete and the agency changed the way tax information is entered into the form by students and parents.
“That was a significant technological change, which was supposed to be an improvement and it is — for people who have a very straightforward tax situation and have a Social Security number,” Garfield said. “But for others, it’s actually more difficult than the old form used to be.”
In the past, parents without a Social Security number printed out a signature page, signed it and mailed it into the Department of Education. This year, all parents providing information on the FAFSA were required to make an online account to sign their child’s application. But that new part of the process had a technical glitch that halted the entire process for some students for weeks or months until it was resolved.
For parents without Social Security numbers, the student completes a section of the FAFSA to send an electronic invitation to their parents to contribute information to the form. The account matching process happens based on the parent’s first and last name, birth date and current mailing address.
If the student enters any piece of that information even slightly differently than the way it was entered on the parent’s account, the accounts will not link together, Garfield said.
For example, if a parent typed the word “Street” to describe their address and the student used the “St.” abbreviation, the FAFSA accounts will not link.
When students called the FAFSA helpline for technical assistance, it often took hours to connect with representatives who were responding to a high volume of calls for help that sometimes got disconnected, Garfield said.
For Carrillo-Rodriguez, the complicated process was compounded when she needed to connect her mother in Mexico to three-way calls with a Spanish-speaking representative in order to help complete the form.
Carrillo-Rodriguez doesn’t know how much financial aid she will receive for this school year because she wasn’t able to complete the form until Aug. 14, just five days before her third year of classes started this fall at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
“If students have to spend their summer worrying about this form and are not able to plan ahead for what their school year is going to look like, or if they’re having to make the choice of not going to college this year because they don’t know how they’re going to cover the cost, that’s going to have a huge impact on all of us in Colorado — not just on the students and their families — but also on employers and community members,” Garfield said.
This week, more than 14.4 million FAFSA forms have been submitted, compared with about 14.8 million submitted through Aug. 26, 2023, according to a representative from the U.S. Department of Education. “We have been processing FAFSA forms quickly and reliably since March,” the representative wrote in an email to The Colorado Sun.
Colorado ranks 45th in the nation compared to all other U.S. states, and Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, for its number of high school students who completed the FAFSA.
Colorado had 2,737 fewer FAFSA completions this academic year compared with last school year, according to the National College Attainment Network.
The statewide completion rate for the FAFSA form students filled out during the 2022-23 school year was 42%, 11.4 percentage points below prior-year rates in Colorado, and 6 percentage points below the national average that year of 53.4%, according to the Colorado Department of Higher Education.
“We’re still hovering right around the lowest five states,” said Angie Paccione, executive director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education, adding, only about 50% of Colorado high school graduates attend college. “We’ve been hovering right around there for quite a long time.”
A low FAFSA completion rate that school year meant Colorado students did not receive more than $30 million from federal grants that were intended to support them, according to the Colorado Department of Higher Education.
“It’s an urgent crisis because Colorado has more jobs that require a college degree or credential than we have students who are in college and preparing to graduate with those credentials,” Garfield said.
Colorado received $3.8 billion in state aid from the American Rescue Plan Act and state lawmakers allocated $200 million of it to workforce development and education initiatives.
One of those initiatives, Fund My Future, two years ago provided money to high schools that would make FAFSA completion a graduation requirement. The schools selected had low FAFSA completion rates and a high number of students who were enrolled in a free or reduced lunch program, Paccione said.
The FAFSA completion rate increased at each of the four schools that participated in the first year’s cohort.
Colorado High School Charter GES campus’ completion rate increased the most, to 70% from 28% followed by Colorado High School Charter Osage’s rate, which increased to 60% from 37%, for example.
“But then, last school year, we had the FAFSA debacle, so just like everyone else in the country, we had low rates that fell back to around 38%,” she said. “We’re disappointed in that, but we’re hoping in the next couple of years, we’ll see that number shoot back up to more than 70%.”
Where to get help
As some students continue struggling to complete their FAFSAs for this school year, and while they and their college advisers wait for the upcoming application to reopen Oct. 1, Denver Scholarship Foundation leaders said they want to help ensure scholars have the support they need, so they don’t give up on filling out the application.
- The Denver Scholarship Foundation is providing individualized support to students who still need help completing the form and the organization is planning to list on its website more opportunities for support for students within the next week, Garfield said.
- Students in the metro Denver area can sign up for a free appointment for help at the Educational Opportunity Center at the Community College of Denver.
- Financial aid offices at colleges also can help students who have questions about the FAFSA.
- And Denver Public Schools students who attend schools with a Future Center should utilize the facility as much as possible, Palacios said.
- The Denver Scholarship Foundation website has a list of available financial aid resources for high school and college students and information about scholarships.
- The Colorado Department of Higher Education has FAFSA resources on its website.
- The department is hosting a virtual event Sept. 12 from 5-6:30 p.m., to help answer questions or concerns about the FAFSA and the CASFA, the Colorado Application for State Financial Aid. Attendees must register before the event.
Colorado Department of Higher Education leaders are also helping students fill out the FAFSA or CASFA on Thursday afternoons from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Students must sign up for a session beforehand.
