The number of graduating seniors filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) declined by thousands across San Antonio compared with last year – foreshadowing a possible decline in the number of students going to college in the fall.
The numbers come from the National College Attainment Network, which analyzes federal data for school down to the high school level.
Up to 100 other students who completed the form may not have had their information transmitted to their chosen colleges after several outages disrupted communications between those colleges and the U.S. Department of Education.
With just weeks to go before classes begin, colleges and universities are still projecting record-breaking enrollment – but advocates and university officials warn those numbers could dwindle if students don’t receive the funding they need to pay for college by the time tuition comes due.
“We know there are less students who have completed the FAFSA,” said Ana Acevedo, San Antonio Education Partnership director. “How that translates into attendance and enrollment in college, I think, is still yet to be seen.”
FAFSA has historically been a “strong indicator” of a student’s chances of attending college, she said.
The nonprofit headed by Acevedo has been hosting free FAFSA advising sessions at the Capital One Cafe at the Shops at La Cantera throughout the summer and last spring to increase that number.
A botched rollout
The lower numbers come after an updated application, which is needed to get federal loans and institutional aid, launched months later than usual last year and with a complete redesign following a 2020 piece of legislation called the FAFSA Simplification Act.
Despite reforms including a shorter response form and less required information from tax documents than in years past — which removes logistical hurdles and opens up more funds for the neediest students — many new problems have cropped up in the months since the form came online.
Just days after it went live, for example, students and parents began reporting issues completing the form, with the number of glitches increasing in the months since, particularly for families with dual or otherwise mixed citizenship.
Those issues have persisted and have been compounded by a sluggish response by the federal government, which announced just last week that corrections submitted to completed forms would be processed individually instead of in batches.
Brandy McLelland, vice president of enrollment management at Texas A&M-San Antonio, said that delay could keep students from finding out how much funding they are eligible for by up to a year.
“Students often have to correct information they’ve submitted on their FAFSA, maybe there have been changes in their status,” she said. “They will not be allowing us to send those corrections in batches, meaning for every single student, we will have to send it separately, which is a significant amount of time.”
Without providing specifics, McLelland said the growing university is expected to eclipse the record-breaking enrollment it welcomed last year.
Cristen Alicea, director of finance for the University of the Incarnate Word, a small private university, said they also anticipate meeting enrollment targets with some “melt” expected in the fall. (When enrolled students end up not attending when classes begin.)
“I really genuinely feel from the way things had been going that we would have had another record class, if not for the FAFSA issues,” she said. “I really think there’s a lot of them that have just given up.”
There is no way to calculate for that population, she said.
High schools navigate FAFSA
Counselors and college specialists have been working to help students navigate the broken process at high schools across the region.
Rita Griffith, a college, career and military readiness specialist at Madison High School in the North East Independent School District, said the decrease in applications is not for a lack of trying. Seniors spent days working with campus staff, reviewing their applications, with many errors being discovered and fixed.
“I think it just discourages kids from wanting to complete it,” she said.
Madison High School had about 13% fewer students complete applications than last year, according to NCAN data. Students have to fill out a form opting out of completing the form in order to graduate.
A disconnect between the new form and the state system that allows teachers to track the completion also made it difficult to ensure students had successfully completed the application.
“I will say that when it worked well, like the few occasions that the system did work the way it was intended to, it did sort of streamline the process and make it a lot easier for kids,” she said.
That was also the experience of many prospective students filling out the forms at the Capital One Cafe Friday, sometimes zipping through the forms in less than 30 minutes.
Despite the complications, the San Antonio Independent School District also had success over the last year.
They ended up with 89% of seniors filling out the form – just 1% shy of last year.
Efforts include hosting family nights at every high school in the district during the year, as well as outreach over the summer by postsecondary navigators to every SAISD graduate to confirm where they are in the application and admissions process and to ensure that they are enrolled in college in the fall.
The district also provided $25 Amazon Gift Cards for students who provided a financial award letter and college schedule using small grants through the SAISD Foundation and the ECMC Foundation, according to spokeswoman Laura Short.
Stuck in Limbo
More worrying than the lower completion rates to Alicea and McLelland is the unspecified number of students who actually filled out the form and submitted it – without it ever making it to admissions officials.
Over several days in June, UIW and TAMUSA received no FAFSA forms from the Department of Education. TAMUSA has had other subsequent intermittent connection issues in recent weeks as well.
Alicea said the problem may have been related to an expired password for the mailbox used to communicate and receive files from the Education Department, but files from those dates were not accessible once access was restored.
“There’s just this group of files that never came through,” she said. “So we’re just kind of stuck in this limbo of, we know there’s a problem, but we can’t figure out what caused the problem.”
Alicea said the federal government has said any issues are on the institutional level. They did not respond to a request for comment from the Report by Friday afternoon.
“They’re denying that there’s a problem,” Alicea said.
TAMUSA’s outages affected as many as 100 student applications, McLelland said, based on the number of applications they typically would receive during those periods.
“We’re doing everything we can on our campus to mitigate that concern,” she said. “We are reaching out to students who had a FAFSA filed last year that we don’t see a FAFSA filed this year, we’re reaching out to students [in] multiple different ways … to try to mitigate that the best we can.”
“Our number one concern at this point is making sure that we’re trying to find students who think they’ve done something, but we didn’t get it,” she added. “And we want to make sure that we’re getting with them as soon as possible to make sure their steps taken care of.”
