For much of the last decade, about 44% of high school seniors in Idaho each year completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The FAFSA determines college financial aid eligibility.
The Biden Administration last year planned a major update, meant to streamline the process and allow more students to qualify. But the program’s launch was delayed three months from its usual October 1 to January.
“And then once it did open, it has been riddled with errors and issues,” explained Jenni Kimball, College and Career advising program manager for the Idaho State Board of Education. She first spoke with Boise State Public Radio in May.
Typically, most high school seniors just a few weeks shy of graduation would already have all the information they need to make a college decision. Not this year.
“It's been a rough couple of months for certainly our students and our families and our counselors and advisors who are helping those students fill it out,” she said.
Glitches in the software popped up regularly, and even once a student may have completed the FAFSA and submitted it to the Department of Education, processing was riddled with errors and delays.
Struggles with the new FAFSA process have been blamed for falling completion rates: 35.7% in Idaho as of July 5, and 46.6% nationwide. Completions are down 11% year-over-year across the board - but that’s better than the spring when completion rates were down significantly more.
“Our low income minority, first generation-to-college students are really the ones who are struggling with this form the most,” Kimball said. Data show greater year-over-year FAFSA participation declines for both low-income schools (-11.3%) and "high-minority" student populations (-20.2) in Idaho when compared to richer schools (-10.2%) or "low-minority" populations (-14.2%).
Caldwell High School college and career counselor Jessie Stockdale has seen frustrations play out firsthand.
“About a third of our students that were thinking about going [to college] have been completely discouraged and probably won't even try,” she said.
Caldwell Schools have many low-income students that would likely qualify for federal Pell grants and other financial support. Stockdale said it is precisely those students facing the most daunting hurdles.
“It's correlated so much with complicated life situations and other confounding factors that are going to make everything that they were presenting more difficult,” she said.
One of the most-promoted new features of the updated FAFSA, a data link to required tax information, didn’t always work. When it did, it wasn’t reliable, explained Kimball.
“A student who's a citizen, but their parent may not have a Social Security number, that parent has not been able to access the form. The form just would not work even though it was supposed to,” she said.
Federal officials rolled out fixes to many issues and improved processing delays by the spring, but it may have come too late for some.
Most schools delayed deadlines as long as possible, and tried to be flexible for students, but some still missed out on potential scholarships or grants.
Kimball said a record number — more than 10,000 students — applied for the Idaho Opportunity Scholarship, but about one-third were disqualified because their FAFSA paperwork wasn’t ready by the application deadline. The practical effect of those disqualifications were somewhat muted because most of the Opportunity Scholarship funding this year went to existing college student renewals, which are prioritized.
Kimball said there wasn’t enough remaining funding to offer a scholarship to every new student who successfully applied.
Returning college students also have to renew their FAFSAs.
“We've sent emails, we've made phone calls, we've sent texts,” said Kris Collins, Associate Vice President for enrollment at Boise State University. “So we're doing everything we can to communicate directly with students.”
Despite a drop in FAFSA applications, Collins said enrollment eventually began tracking up for this fall. She thinks that gap could be because students may have been more selective. “They're only sending [the FAFSA] out to the one or two schools that they're really considering,” she said.
The impact has been more pronounced at Caldwell’s private College of Idaho, said its Vice President of Enrollment Brian Bava.
“What went from a six-month window to work with families, really explain to them that attending a private college like College of Idaho was possible, was reduced even further to six weeks,” he said.
The school had received around 200 fewer FAFSA applications as of July. Bava said that could make a big difference at a school of only around 1,100 total students.
“We're still working with lots of families on trying to finalize their decision for the fall,” Bava shared. “Some of them have just gotten their FAFSA situation figured out, and so now what I'm more concerned about is the students that we lost in the interim period because of all those delays.”
Nampa’s Northwest Nazarene University said they weren’t sure yet how enrollment might be affected.
It’s possible that all the uncertainty led some students to choose lower sticker prices at public schools.
Enrollment at Boise State University and the University of Idaho is up. But U of I associate vice president for enrollment, Dean Kahler, said he’s most worried about the students he doesn’t know about, who never asked for help.
“I'm really concerned about those students and families. And, you know, they're trying to navigate it, and they may not have anybody that they can go to for a resource,” he said.
This spring, the Biden administration gave states millions of dollars for FAFSA outreach and assistance this summer. That’s paid for dozens of pop-up support locations across Idaho since June. Kimball, with Idaho’s education board, says those sessions targeted underserved populations and have led to about 100 completed applications.
The State Board of Education is recommending anyone still working to complete a FAFSA application do so by July 30 to get the best chance at receiving financial aid this fall.
Meanwhile, college admissions offices say they’re already behind in preparing for next year's FAFSA cycle — and the federal government has not said whether the application would be available on time October first or not.
Kahler says the growing pains for college admissions teams have been helpful in a way, perhaps allowing a deeper understanding of the process and what’s called the "student aid index."
“I think we can build financial aid packages a little bit more intelligently,” he said. “Not that we were unintelligent, but we just were uninformed about this new process. I think schools will be able to dial that in a lot more now that we've gone through the cycle once.”
But the optimism is only cautious, said Bava.
“To go through this again would be just unreasonable, frankly, and unacceptable.”
Update: This story has been updated to reflect the latest enrollment estimate information from Boise State showing enrollment trends for this coming fall are higher than normal.
Editor's Note: The original radio version of this story in one instance included the use of the word “employment” instead of the correct word “enrollment.” That has been changed in this published version.
