Problems with new federal application could mean thousands fewer SC students in college

The Tiger, Clemson University's mascot, leads a parade of students receiving scholarships from the Meeting Street Scholarship Fund at Charleston's Gaillard Center on Sunday, June 23, 2024. Scholarship recipients will be able to attend college free of charge but the process was not without issues due to the botched rollout of a new federal financial aid application. (Meeting Street Scholarship Fund/Provided)

CHARLESTON – More South Carolina high school graduates are seeking state-funded, need-based grants that help them afford college. Unfortunately, that’s the aid most impacted by the U.S. Department of Education’s botched rollout of a new application.

The revamped Free Application for Federal Student Aid — FAFSA for short — was supposed to make things simpler for those seeking federal student loans and grants. Instead, the application came out three months behind schedule and was plagued with technical glitches.

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The number of completed FAFSA applications dropped by more than 11% for the Class of 2024 compared to last year, both in South Carolina and nationwide.

For the Palmetto State, that means about 3,300 fewer high school graduates are enrolling in college this fall. Nationwide, numbers are down by about 250,000 students, suggesting more students are putting off college or opting not to attend altogether.

To make matters worse, of those students who did apply, some are still waiting to find out whether they’ll receive the money they need to cover their tuition. That includes a growing number of students seeking South Carolina grants distributed based on need, rather than academic performance. The first step for applying for a need-based grant is to complete the federal aid application, which determines how much aid a student’s eligible to receive.

Determining who is eligible for need-based aid is complicated. It comes down to more than just family income. The federal formula for calculating how much a student should receive also measures the cost of the college they’re attending, family size, as well as outside circumstances that may affect a family’s ability to pay, such as unemployment or excessive medical expenses.

An endless loop

For Jorden Myers, applying for financial aid for college was a frustratingly endless loop.

The Dillon High School graduate had completed the FAFSA, but despite meeting all the criteria for the maximum amount of federal financial aid available, her application results came back as ineligible for a low-income Pell Grant. She didn’t understand what had gone wrong.

She spent two hours on the phone with staff from the federal aid program.

“But they kept telling me stuff I already knew,” Myers said, simply repeating the list of Pell qualifications rather than offering an explanation for what may have caused the error.

Staff members of the Meeting Street Scholarship Fund, a private, Charleston-headquartered foundation that covers gaps in financing to give low-income Pell Grant students a free college education, said it perplexed them as well.

Myers called Clemson University, where she had applied. But the school had not yet officially accepted her and told her they couldn’t help.

Luckily, the University of South Carolina last year implemented a program automatically admitting the top 10% of every South Carolina high school’s graduating class. It was there that financial aid staff gave Myers the advice to start the application process from the beginning, taking time to look up terminology she did not recognize to ensure she was answering all of the questions correctly.

“A lot of the language they were using, I didn’t quite understand it,” Myers said. “I was having to Google it, and I still ended up causing me to answer questions wrong because I couldn’t make sense of the questions.”

Finally, with just two weeks to go before the deadline for the Meeting Street funding she was counting on to make her college dreams a reality, Myers’ results came back the way they were supposed to. She received the financial aid she needed to pursue a biological sciences degree from Clemson. She wants to be a dentist.

“It was very stressful,” Myers said. “There were definitely times I’d look at my mom and be like, ‘I’ve worked so hard, and I’ve tried so hard to get these scholarships to be able to go to college, and I’m still not going to be able to do it financially.’ ”

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Myers will be the first in her family to attend college. And, thanks to the Meeting Street fund, her tuition will be fully covered.

“Never did me or my parents think I’d have the opportunity to have a full ride,” she said. “They’re all tickled.”

Myers said she hopes to be a role model to her twin younger siblings.

“That’s always been my inspiration – my brother and sister,” she said. “I tried to do my best and show them you can do it if you put everything into it. They’ve seen me cry about getting a certain grade on a test, and they’d say it’s not that serious. I’d be like, ‘Yes, it is.’ ”

Still waiting

While Myers now has her financial aid in hand, others are still waiting.

At Trident Technical College in North Charleston, about 10% of students who submitted a FAFSA have been delayed due to errors in the application system, said Nicole Burton, the tech school’s associate financial aid director.

Those students needed to send in additional documentation or make corrections but were only recently able to do so, she said. Even now, technical glitches are a hindrance.

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“It’s really difficult when students are turning to us for answers, and we’re still waiting on guidance from the (U.S.) Department of Education,” Burton said. “Our goal is to get them in and be successful, and we’re just working as hard as we can to make that possible.”

Burton said some of the application questions had particularly complicated language that tripped up students.

“They’re having a hard time understanding what the question is actually asking, so many of them have answered those questions incorrectly,” she said. “That’s been a bit frustrating for students.”

For example, there’s a question about whether or not the parent provides financial support for the student. Students who are paying their own way through school may answer no. But by answering the question in that way, they inadvertently disqualify themselves for a Pell Grant, or work study and some state aid.

Myers said she has heard of no planned wording changes on the application for 2026, set to open up in less than three months.

“So unfortunately, I don’t see the confusion clearing up for the future,” she said.

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While every student aid package is different, students attending Trident Tech tend to rely more heavily on need-based aid, Myers said. For these students, the FAFSA is particularly important as it determines their eligibility for both state and federal funding.

More than 40,000 South Carolina residents received a $3,500 need-based scholarship, funded by proceeds from the state lottery, for the 2022-2023 school year, according to the latest data from the state Commission on Higher Education.

That’s 10,000 more students than three years earlier, before the COVID-19 pandemic. The total amount awarded jumped more than 2½ times higher, with $80.6 million distributed in 2022-23, compared to $31 million in 2019-20.

For more than 46,500 students attending technical colleges in the state in 2022-2023, the state provided need-based aid of $80 per credit hour. In all, $55.7 million was awarded for enrollment in two-year schools.

The state higher education agency does not yet have data to determine how the FAFSA snafu could impact these awards. South Carolina scholarships awarded based on academic performance are not reliant on the federal aid application. Neither are scholarships provided to technical college students enrolled in high-demand career fields, such as manufacturing, building trades, cybersecurity, hospitality, teaching and nursing.

A ‘material impact’

College freshmen aren’t the only ones impacted. The application has to be completed annually for any income changes.

When Allen Gomez, a rising senior at Clemson, went to fill out his application this year, his family’s account no longer existed. It was inexplicably deleted rather than rolled over into the new system, so he couldn’t log in.

“I remember I called for about a month and I couldn’t talk to anybody,” he said, adding he got only an automated message.

Gomez hopes to go on to medical school after finishing his biochemistry degree.

A childhood accident after his family moved back to Ecuador amid the Great Recession is what drove him to go into medicine. Macas, where his grandparents lived, is a small town, maybe a mile wide, in the middle of the jungle. In his first week there, Gomez slipped while swinging on the monkey bars at a local park playground and broke his hand.

He needed surgery, but the nearest hospital said it would be four days before a surgeon would arrive.

That experience set Gomez on a path to seeking a medical degree so he might one day be able to help others in underserved areas. Having the financial aid that has kept him debt free as an undergraduate is helping make medical school a possibility.

It’s a substantial amount of funding — upwards of $20,000 annually — that’s at stake between the Pell Grant, state need-based scholarships, and the Meeting Street fund, for those who qualify, said John Huber-MacNealy, program director with Meeting Street.

“So, we’re talking a real, material impact,” he said.

This year Huber-MacNealy and his colleagues fielded a much higher volume of calls from students trying to navigate the federal financial aid process.

“When people think about what keeps students from under-resourced families from going to college, the obvious answer is money,” he said. “Maybe even more critically, they don’t have the knowledge to navigate the financial aid process. And so, I have seen just as many students held back by that gap.”

Of the larger state schools, both Clemson and USC say they are on track to meet goals for freshman enrollment despite the woes caused by FAFSA.

Preliminary numbers at USC show a freshman class size similar to the 7,200 who enrolled at the state’s largest college last fall. Clemson did not provide estimated enrollment numbers for this fall, but the Upstate school had 4,500 freshman last year.

SC Class of 2024 seniors completing the federal aid application

These 10 school districts saw the biggest percentage drop in high school seniors completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid:

1. Saluda County: -38.6%
2. Bamberg County: -34.9%
3. Spartanburg 4 (Woodruff): -34.3%
4. Barnwell County Consolidated School District: -30%
5. Lee County: -28.9%
6. Hampton County: -27%
7. Abbeville County: -26.5%
8. Spartanburg 3 (Glendale): -26%
9. Aiken County: -25.9%
10. Greenwood County 51 (Ware Shoals): -25%

Only 14 districts total statewide saw no decrease. These are the 10 biggest increases:

1. Allendale County: +243%
2. McCormick County: +31%
3. Limestone Charter: +19.4%
4. Laurens 55 (Laurens): +11.9%
5. Lexington 3 (Batesburg-Leesville): +11.4%
6. Calhoun County: +10.8%
7. Lexington 4 (Swansea): +7.4%
8. Union County: +5%
9. Fairfield County: +4.3%
10. Governors School for the Arts: +3.8%

Source: National College Attainment Network

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