HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) — Normally, college students would know by now how much financial aid they’re getting for the new school year.

That, in turn, would normally come after filling out Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, as early as Oct. 1 of nearly a year earlier. PHEAA, Pennsylvania’s centralized grant agency, would normally get a student’s FAFSA information from the feds almost instantly and synthesize it with state and other information to arrive at an award amount by mid-August.

But this year?

“It has not been a normal year,” said Nathan Hence, senior vice president of public affairs for PHEAA, the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency.

That’s because the U.S. Department of Education implemented a new FAFSA system for students starting at colleges and other postsecondary education institutions this fall. Those students couldn’t begin filling out their FAFSAs until about Jan. 1 instead of Oct. 1. And whereas PHEAA normally gets student FAFSA information nearly in real time, this year it got more than 300,000 files all at once in May.

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“And then when we did receive the records, there were a lot of data issues with the files,” said Diona Brown, PHEAA’s director of school services.

On top of that, PHEAA overhauled its own system, from one so old no one’s sure how old it was and not many people alive knew how to maintain to a new cloud-based system called GrantUs .

Why would PHEAA plan to roll out its own new system at the same time the feds rolled out theirs?

Answer: It didn’t plan to do that.

“We were looking at: Okay, if the feds roll out their new form in [20]23-24, we’ll do our modernization for 24-25,” Hence said. “So we would be building our system after the feds already built theirs.”

But then the feds delayed their rollout by a year, and that news came too late for PHEAA to follow suit and delay its own overhaul by a year, Hence said.

The upshot: Students are starting this school year without knowing how much aid they’re getting. Hence and Brown said students should get that information by sometime in September.

Brown said PHEAA has been encouraging institutions to use a grant estimator to inform students as soon as possible of their likely awards. Some Pennsylvania schools use the estimator every year; others don’t.

PHEAA is running a series of webinars to guide applicants through the process. High school seniors and their parents can register for one Wednesday (Aug. 21) at 6 p.m .

Those seniors likely won’t be able to fill out their FAFSAs until Dec. 1 rather than Oct. 1, but after that, leaders are cautiously optimistic things will go better than for this year’s college freshmen and returning students.

“We’re really hopeful here at PHEAA that [20]25-26 will be a smoother year for students and families,” Hence said.

For returning students this year who got financial aid in the past, no news for now from PHEAA is good news. Brown said students should watch their email (which could come from the GrantUs system this year) or log into their accounts to check for any messages asking for more information of documentation. Otherwise, the next thing they get should be an award amount notification in September.

Pennsylvania is one of 29 states with a “centralized grant disbursement agency” such as PHEAA:

PHEAA’s history dates to 1963.

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