Counselor Edition: About FAFSA Delays
Shveta Bagade discusses how to deal with it
It is early in January and the new and simplified FAFSA form is still not completely ready. Needless to say, it is putting a lot of stress on high school seniors, parents and colleges.
We caught up with College Counselor Shveta Bagade to make sense of it all.
Q1: Shveta, Give us some context as to what is going on with FAFSA.
Shveta: FAFSA is the financial aid application through the federal government.
I want to say maybe 2, maybe it might even been 3 years ago, Congress passed a Law to simplify FAFSA, i.e., to make it easier for families to apply for Financial Aid.
So, normally FAFSA application opens up October 1, but the new form was not ready. So it was delayed till December. It did not open till December 31.
Q2: So, what is a Soft Launch of the FAFSA?
Shveta: There was a requirement in the Simplification Law that if the new FAFSA form wasn’t ready by December 31, 2023, then they would have to revert back to the old form on January 1.
The Soft Launch allows it to circumvent that requirement.
But the Colleges know is that it's not quite ready. There are glitches that are being worked on as we speak.
Q3: What Kind of Glitches are we talking about?
Shveta: Students and families are seeing their information not being saved, some couldn’t open or sometimes even create an account.
I actually know a student who tried to fill it out, when he tried to submit, it just hung up.
If you don't have a super complicated financial situation, basically you pay taxes, then it populates from the taxes you pay. Then it should probably only take like 30 to 40 minutes to complete.
Q4: What Should Students be doing now?
Shveta: So one of the things a lot of the colleges are recommending is look at their financial aid deadline date, and kind of wait closer to that to submit.
The other interesting factoid is that even if you're able to get your form submitted, the federal government won't forward it to the colleges till later this month till they have double checked the data on their system.
So I'm telling students look at the deadline, if their deadline is February 1, I would at least wait a week or two.
Q5: So, what about the colleges? What should students & families expect?
Shveta: That is the million dollar question.
It does put a tighter timeline on the colleges to kind of put together you know, their offer packages for students. And of course, this is impacting students who did ED who are looking for financial aid.
So any research you can do now on colleges that you've applied to, and trying to decide, start doing it now. So you can have that time to make the decision, because it's probably going to be shorter amount of time.
The colleges are claiming they're going to do their best to have the packages out as quickly as possible, when they get the information. But it's going to be it's going to be tricky for them, because they're not doing it for like 10-20 people, they're doing it for 1000s of students!
So, it is going to be important for families, to be a little bit patient, kind of think ahead a little bit and be prepared.
And of course, usually a lot of schools have these financial cost calculators, that kind of can give you a good aid estimate. But with the changes, it's not going to be as accurate as has been in the past. The estimated amount of financial aid they may get, may be lower than expected or higher than expected.
Unfortunately, maybe a complicated process got even more complicated.
So please be patient!
Thank You to All for supporting my Podcast and this Newsletter, and to all My Guests who have been generous with their time and counsel on my podcasts.
Have a Wonderful January 2024!
Venkat