FAFSA delays and end of affirmative action are colliding for a chaotic college admissions season

By Hilary Burns

On March 30, 2024

Ailine Rodrigues was accepted to all 11 colleges she applied to. An aspiring first-generation student, she still doesn’t know if she can afford her top choice or other four-year institutions because of delays with the federal government’s financial aid program.

“It’s really frustrating,” Rodrigues said. “My mom all the time [is] asking me if the college has said anything about how much we’re going to pay, and I don’t know how to answer her questions. So I come to my college counselor, and I ask them, but they don’t know either.”

The lengthy longjam in the financial aid program is disrupting the college acceptance season this spring just as colleges and applicants learn how the US Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action last year — and the schools’ efforts to mitigate it — will affect diversity on campus.About one month before students are typically expected to secure their spots at universities, the federal government has not told manyfamilies how much aid they will get.

“This has been a disaster,” said Jade Franco, program officer for the Boston Foundation’s Pathways to Postsecondary Success, which helps prepare low-income students in the Greater Boston region for higher education and careers. “The students who are coming from backgrounds that have more obstacles to overcome — those students have really struggled, and feel very frustrated and broken by this year’s financial aid process.”

To apply for federal aid and scholarships, students have to provide extensive financial information to the federal government through the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. Many colleges use that data as the basis for the financial aid packages they offer to students, usually by late March — often much earlier. Students are normally required to send deposits to secure their spots by May 1.

This year, however, errors, delays, and bureaucratic dysfunction disrupted the rollout of what was supposed to be a simplified FAFSA form. For example, students had trouble submitting their parents’ Social Security numbers,especially if one or both parents were undocumented, and faced long wait times for assistance. About 30 percent fewer students completed the federal financial aid form this year as of March 15, according to the National College Attainment Network’s FAFSA Tracker.

Financial aid will undoubtedly loom large in students’ decision-making. In 2020, 72 percent of all undergraduates received some type of financial aid, according to the US Department of Education, including about 81 percent of Black students, 72 percent of Latino students, 70 percent of white students, and 66 percent of Asian students.

As a workaround, some schools are rushing to put together aid offers, collecting their own financial information, or are pushing back deadlines for students to submit deposits.

Higher education watchers worry the botched rollout means scores of low- and middle-income students will not be able to weigh multiple offers and make informed decisions. And although students can request extensions for their deposits, students from marginalized backgrounds are less likely “to ask for help and raise their hand to ask,” Franco said.

“It’s adding more steps and red tape,” she said.

Bob Bardwell, executive director of the Massachusetts School Counselors Association, said he is concerned some students will instead take a job or a gap year, or attend a community college rather than enroll at a four-year school.

“FAFSA is a complete nightmare,” Bardwell said. “These arefamilies who may decide higher ed is not worth it. That is a shame. The government is supposed to be helping them.”

A spokesperson for the US Department of Education said it remains “focused on helping students and families through this process and supporting colleges produce aid offers as quickly as possible.”

“We have now processed more than 6 million FAFSA forms and [are] now returning to normal processing timelines, which means colleges and institutions will receive student records within one to three days after submission,” the spokesperson said. “The department continues to encourage schools, states, and scholarship organizations to provide flexibility and as much time as possible for students to make important enrollment decisions.”

Heading into this year’s admissions season, some college leadersfeared the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision would cause fewer students of color to even apply to elite colleges. In California, for example, applications to top public universities from Black and Hispanic high school graduates fell after the state banned affirmative action in 1996.

Preliminary data from this year’s admissions cycle, however, suggest that hasn’t happened: The number of Black, Latino, Native American, and Pacific Islander applicants to four-year colleges using the Common App was up 10 percent from a year earlier, and the number of first-generation applicants grew 4 percent, according to data published this month by the Common App. And several colleges, including Harvard University and Brown University, reported in December they accepted higher percentages of first-generation students in their early admissions rounds.

That may be in part because many colleges tooksteps last year to encourage Black and Hispanic students to apply, including sending representatives to talk with students at more high schools with high proportions of students of color.

“I was a high school counselor for six years, and that was a really big thing when you have a [college representative] come to school and talk to students,” said Kendra Grinnage, an associate principal with higher education consulting firm Kennedy & Company.

Colleges also developed stronger partnerships with community organizations that work with low-income high school students, and retrained admission officers to ignore applicants’ race.

The high court’s decision did not end admissions policies where colleges consider factors such as applicants’ life experiences and the challenges they’ve overcome.Many colleges added supplemental essay questions to give applicants the opportunity to talk about how factors such as culture, ethnicity, gender, and community have influenced their identities, world views, and ambitions.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst, for example, now asks students to reflect on a community or group that has defined or shaped their world, and how being a product of that community would enrich the campus.

“Having just a little bit more information that puts things in context was very helpful,” said Jim Roche, vice provost for enrollment management at UMass Amherst.

However, these changes made the application process, already an opaque and stress-inducing experience, more confusing for some students, who questioned whether they should discuss race or not, said Adam Nguyen, founder of Ivy Link, which works with wealthy families and students to improve their chances of being selected to top colleges.

“Should I bring up race if I’m not in a previously protected class?” Nguyen said. “That is what students were wondering about. What challenges did I overcome?”

Some colleges admitted more students this year, which “gives them a better chance to end up with a diverse class,” said Wes Butterfield, an Iowa-based enrollment consultant with Ruffalo Noel Levitz who advises colleges. “You’re doing it based on volume.”

Applications to UMass Amherst surpassed 50,000 for the second year in a row, with accepted students up 1.5 percent from a year ago. UMass accepted 29,567 students this year; the first-year class is 5,275 students.

Applications from students in underrepresented groups, meanwhile, grew 11 percent, and admissions from those groups increased by 7 percent. African American, Latino, Native American, and Alaskan Native students account for 17 percent of the undergraduate population at UMass Amherst.

Rodrigues, a senior at the Academy of the Pacific Rim Charter School in Hyde Park, moved with her family to Massachusetts from Cape Verde when she was a toddler. She was accepted to Northeastern University in Boston, UMass Amherst and Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, N.H. Her top choice is Northeastern because of the school’s robust internship and co-op programs.

Northeastern’s total sticker price before financial aid for the current academic year is $86,821, while the average annual cost students pay to attend the school is $34,255, according to the Department of Education’s College Scorecard.

Her mother urged her to apply to community college if her financial aid packages don’t arrive before deposits are due.

“If FAFSA doesn’t give us any money, that would probably be my only choice, because we can’t pay that much,” Rodrigues said.

This piece was republished from the Boston Globe.