The FAFSA crisis casts cloud of uncertainty over Pittsburgh high schoolers, universities

After graduating from Pittsburgh Public Schools this spring, senior Layla Johnson plans to become the first in her family to attend college. She’s already committed to Howard University, a historically Black research university, but she did so before receiving the financial aid offer that would tell her how much she’ll need to pay to attend.

Johnson was only beginning to receive aid offers from other colleges as of early May, she said at the time, and felt she was “running out of time” to decide where to enroll based on her financial needs. In the middle of that uncertainty, she knew she really liked Howard, so she put down a deposit to reserve her spot in the incoming class.

She was “kind of OK” with the estimated net price that a calculator on the university’s website gave her. But, “I’m also feeling like I really need my financial aid packet — like, now.”

In a normal school year, Johnson and thousands of other students across the country would have had several more weeks to consider their aid offers, which can reduce their tuition costs by thousands of dollars, before committing to a college. Put differently, they would have had several more weeks to weigh their college dreams against tuition costs that can spell years of burdensome debt.

It’s not too late to submit a FAFSA for the fall

The form is due as early as June 1, 2024 , midnight Central time, according to the U.S. Department of Education .

For first-time applicants enrolled in a community college, business school, trade or technical school, hospital school of nursing, designated Pennsylvania open-admission institution, or nontransferable two-year program, the form is due by Aug. 1, 2024 , midnight Central time.

The revised Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, is supposed to simplify the process for receiving financial aid, but its rollout this school year has been plagued by delays and errors. At the end of April, 36% of Pennsylvania’s high school seniors had completed the form, roughly 55,400 people, according to the National College Attainment Network. That’s about 15,000 fewer students than last school year.

The crisis has frustrated high school counselors, challenged college administrators and stressed students, especially those from low-income families who are pinning their hopes on financial aid. Some students may choose pricier options because they lack their other aid offers, and others may not attend at all this fall, advocates for college access say. Studies have shown that students who delay enrollment are less likely to earn a degree in the future.

In turn, the advocates say universities may see their enrollment numbers decline, sending financial shocks through the many institutions that depend on tuition revenue. Enrollment figures are still in flux at many schools. Colleges typically ask new students to commit and make deposits by May 1, but hundreds have pushed back their deadlines this year to May 15 or June 1.

‘Really overwhelming’

The FAFSA allows students to receive federal, state and institutional financial aid. About three years ago, Congress mandated that the U.S. Department of Education overhaul the form so it would be easier to complete, would better account for inflation and would expand the number of low-income students who qualify for the federal Pell Grant.

Typically released at the start of October, the revised form “ soft launched ” at the end of December, three months behind schedule. The department soon announced that colleges would not receive students’ FAFSA data until the first half of March. In previous years, that’s typically when colleges would have sent aid offers to students.

When March came, the department announced an error in its financial aid calculations that would further delay the process for 200,000 applicants. The department also said that students could not make corrections to their applications until the first half of April.

The disruptions steered students to counselor Brendan Coyne with “all kinds of questions,” about the form, he said. Coyne, who works at Pittsburgh Public Schools’ Creative and Performing Arts 6-12 magnet school, said his students have struggled with making corrections to their submitted forms and getting in touch with the education department.

“You email them, you get no answer. You do the little chat feature they have, you get no answer. You call, and they hang up on you, multiple times. Yesterday … one student did it four times and was hung up on four times,” Coyne said in an early May interview.

“The anxiety level for students is through the roof, and it should be at this point,” he continued. He thinks a lot of his students “need every little bit of money that they can get to go to these schools, to make it affordable.” At the school, about 30% of students are economically disadvantaged and about 40% are students of color.

Johnson, who attends the school, said she and her mother hurriedly began filling out the FAFSA soon after the form became available. The two had to figure out how to complete it, as neither had done so before. “We were so worried that, if we didn’t do it the first day, we wouldn’t get anything because it was rolled out so late,” Johnson said.

The education department later notified Johnson that she needed to add a missing signature to the form, she said. She said she had to wait “a really, really long time” to make the correction and believes her FAFSA was successfully completed at the end of April.

“I remember putting a signature on everything,” Johnson said. “That whole January period to April, there was like nothing, I couldn’t go back and fix anything. It was just being processed, but we didn’t really know what that meant.”

May Shin, a senior at Pittsburgh Public Schools’ Carrick High School, faced a similar challenge after submitting her form around February. She soon noticed errors that needed to be fixed but said she wasn’t able to make the changes in April, around the time the department said students could begin making adjustments.

“It got really overwhelming, to the point where I just submitted it without even making the corrections. I just provided my signature. And I guess we’ll see what happens,” Shin said. She committed to nearby Chatham University, where she plans to study criminology, without receiving an aid offer in advance.

Shin was able to speak with a representative from the education department, but one of her school’s counselors, Amy Hand, said she hadn’t been able to as of early May. That meant she couldn’t get help when one student’s form indicated he was ineligible for financial aid. On a whim, she called the college he had applied to and learned he would be receiving a full-ride scholarship.

“He had no idea,” she said. “At Carrick, not all of our students attend a four-year college right out of high school. So there’s not totally that sense of culture, I would say, among students. But many, many do. And we’re a working-class neighborhood. It just kind of feels like, ‘How do you know what you don’t know?’”

‘Unsure about everything’

The tight timelines and uncertainty that many high school seniors are facing has also affected the universities they hope to attend — and these institutions may not see the true scale of the fallout for at least a few more weeks, if not several more months.

At Duquesne University, staff members involved in enrollment management reach out to the families of accepted students in the spring to gauge whether the students will enroll. Before this year, staff could categorize the responses in six ways, from “Top choice; definitely attending,” to “Thank you but attending elsewhere.”

They added a new category this year: “Unsure about everything.”

Joel Bauman, senior vice president for enrollment management at the private university, said in early May that almost 1,400 incoming freshmen in an expected class of 1,500 have confirmed Duquesne is their top choice. The remainder are waiting to receive other aid offers, but a mid-April survey of financial aid offices found that more than half of the responding institutions hadn’t begun sending them.

That’s putting pressure on some academic programs, Bauman said.

“We have classes to plan, a curriculum that anticipates which classes students will need, and what majors,” he said. “This delay, which we thought we could mitigate, is now sort of deferring actual decisions and is coming up against some deadlines.”

Duquesne began sending out aid offers in April. At least a few other colleges in Pittsburgh have done similarly, with Chatham reportedly completing the process as of early May. They’ve also joined other local schools, including the University of Pittsburgh and Carlow University, in moving back decision and deposit deadlines. Advocates for college access say that’s the right choice.

But the extensions may not help the majority of high school seniors who have yet to complete the FAFSA, due as early as June in Pennsylvania . Chatham has noticed that a larger share of its returning students haven’t finished the form this year, either, said Jennifer Burns, assistant vice president of financial aid and student accounts.

Students who complete the form are much more likely to attend college. Enrollment declines could profoundly impact universities like Carlow and Chatham, where tuition accounted for between roughly 60% and 80% of their revenues in the 2022 fiscal year, respectively. Still, administrators like Burns say it’s too soon to sound an alarm for the fall.

“It’s a concern, I would say, nationwide, for all universities,” said Mollie Cecere, Carlow’s vice president of enrollment management and corporate partnerships. “Because we’ve delayed that deadline for students to make a decision, we’re not yet concerned.”

She added: “But, of course, we’re always preparing. That’s just what you do.”

Lessons learned

Despite the many frustrations and challenges of this school year, there may be one silver lining, according to Joe Herzing, a counselor at Sto-Rox Junior-Senior High School. Its delayed and glitchy rollout aside, the revised form is easier to complete than the previous one, he said.

“If they can get this fixed for next year, this can be really good,” he said.

Other school counselors said the FAFSA debacle has taught their students patience, resiliency and the importance of reaching out for help.

Coyne sometimes asks his quieter seniors to call and order a pizza, on him, to tackle their apprehensiveness about making phone calls to fix problems. With the FAFSA delays, “they’ve been picking up the phone and calling the financial aid office; they’ve been calling the admissions office; they’ve been calling people to ask the questions,” he said.

Hand agreed that her students have learned similar lessons — but she wishes the stakes weren’t so high. This is her first year working at Carrick, the high school she graduated from. She has a “big personal goal” to help her students understand the college application process, FAFSA included.

“I just want our students to know, truly, all of the paths that are available to them,” she said. “It’s just such an ironic thing that my first year working in the place that I’ve wanted to work for so many years is a year where that personal goal of mine has been met with such a barrier.”

Emma Folts covers higher education at PublicSource, in partnership with Open Campus. She can be reached at emma@publicsource.org .

This story was fact-checked by Emily Briselli.

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