Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, and we're going to spend our last 10 minutes or so today with your complaints about questions about, or search for advice for the FAFSA form, 2022's FAFSA form. You know, FAFSA, it's the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. That's what FAFSA stands for. Every year, more than 17 million Americans fill out the form in hopes of making college a bit more affordable in the coming year until late last year. They're still doing it.
Late last year, the Department of Education gave FAFSA a makeover. The government launched a simplified FAFSA form after Congress ordered a change in the 2020 stimulus bill. The new FAFSA is supposed to be simple enough to complete in 10 minutes, but the Department of Education has had a rock so-called soft launch, and an inaccurate formula may actually be standing in the way of students who need those funds to attend university.
If you have FAFSA stories or questions from this year, give us a call, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, FAFSA students, FAFSA parents, FAFSA grandparents, and we're going to get advice and insight from none other than Ron Lieber, the Your Money columnist in The New York Times, who's given us such good advice on other things in the past and maybe you saw his Times article titled, I spent New Year's Eve trying to do the FAFSA. It Didn't Go Well. Hi, Ron.
Ron Lieber: Hello. How are you, Brian?
Brian Lehrer: Good. What happened on New Year's Eve?
Ron Lieber: Well, we have been hearing for months that the federal government was going to open up the doors to the FAFSA "by the end of December" or by December. As the days went by, it just kept not happening and not happening. We weren't getting any word. I figured the doors were going to fly open right before the ball dropped in Times Square on New Year's Eve, and I wanted to see what was going to happen then, what my readers might experience if they were trying to do it themselves.
I have a child who's a high school senior, so I took my shot starting at 2:00 PM or so, and turns out that they only opened the site for about half an hour in the eight o'clock hour. I managed to get in and get started but didn't manage to finish it before they shut it down.
Brian Lehrer: Where are you now?
Ron Lieber: Well, so in the days that went by, things didn't get much better, but then relatively quickly, they fixed a lot of the bugs that were causing people to experience hiccups, although definitely not all of them. Eventually, I was able to get back in and finish the form. Today, the Department of Education has made a pretty good recovery on many counts. The site is open 24/7 and people are able to get in and do the work, at least most people are.
Brian Lehrer: Your mini bio on your piece reads, "Ron last filled out a financial aid form in 1992. He's out of practice. Ha ha ha." Last week, NPR reported on a big mistake within FAFSA that could potentially lower the amount of aid certain students receive. What was this mistake and who's affected?
Ron Lieber: Yes. The challenge is, is that one of many things that changes this year is that there is an entirely new formula that the federal government uses to, in effect, calculate your ability to pay, and thus how much aid you should get from the federal government, whether it's Pell Grants for low-income students, or access to the Federal Student Loan Program, or so-called work-study jobs on campus. It's trying to figure out who deserves what and under what circumstances.
Part of the formula looks at your current income and says, "Okay, well, people have to eat and they have to pay for the roofs over their heads and other essential expenses. We're going to protect a certain amount of income each year before we effectively ask you to use that income to pay for college."
Thankfully, helpfully, the formula is indexed for inflation, but the Department of Education, for reasons that are still not completely clear, did not finish the inflation adjustment part. As we know, in the three years since the law passed, there's been a lot of inflation, right? There's a question as to whether they are actually going to go ahead and finish that sometime in the next month or two which would disrupt a bunch of calculations. If they don't, people are going to pay more in many instances or get less for the federal government than they might have otherwise.
Brian Lehrer: All right. We have some FAFSA questions coming in. Emma in Norwalk, you're on WNYC with Ron Lieber. Hi, Emma.
Emma: Oh, hi. Thanks for taking my call. I was calling because I'm actually a non-traditional student. I'm 32, and I have my associates. I wanted to get my bachelor's, so I applied this past fall, filled out the FAFSA. I actually work in the restaurant industry as a hostess right now, and the FAFSA expects me to pay $20,000 a year before it will give me anything. That makes no sense, because I make enough almost to live on, not even to move to college. I don't get it.
Brian Lehrer: How does the formula think you're going to have $20,000 a year?
Emma: Thank you. Right. [laughs]
Brian Lehrer: Yes. Ron, can you illuminate what she's going through at all and in a way that helps her, or is that just the formula as far as you could tell, and she's stuck?
Ron Lieber: Well, I can help a little bit. First of all, congratulations to you, Emma, for diving back into higher education and taking your shot. That's great. As you've discovered, the FAFSA is really, at the end of the day, just a means by which the federal government distributes what it has, right? Pell Grants are for pretty low-income students. If you're earning a relatively decently living, you may not qualify for that at all.
The thing to remember is that while lots of schools do use the FAFSA figures to figure out what those schools want to do with their own aid, right? Remember, every school has the ability to offer its own scholarships, its own discounts, and it needs to know something about you financially to figure it out. It will use the FAFSA formula, it might even base some of its calculations on that, but it also has flexibility.
Each school is going to do its own thing, and the advantage of applying to multiple schools is that some are likely to be more generous than others, even if they're all using the FAFSA output. All hope is not lost, unless and until you applied a bunch of schools and none of them want give you any money, but you can't figure out what that cost will be until you apply and see what the schools themselves will say.
Brian Lehrer: Emma, I hope that's helpful. Good luck with it. James in Verona has maybe even a worse story. James, you are on WNYC. Hello.
James: Hi. Thanks for having me. Can you hear me?
Brian Lehrer: Yes.
James: Yes. All right. Yes. Right now, I'm a college student. I'm 21. I went to Essex County College before transferring this past semester to Montclair State University. I had applied-- I tried to access my FAFSA account and, obviously, for the FAFSA, you need to have your parents' tax records from a couple of years ago, and so when I tried to access that for my father, he needs an electronic signature in order to sign off on it. In order to do that, you need to log in through his account.
However, when trying to log into his account by using either his Social Security number or saying like, "Oh, I forgot my username, so contact him through his phone or email address or other means," I still was not able to get his signature. As a result, I can't make a new account because his Social Security number is already tied to this one. Because of that, I haven't been able to get financial aid for last semester, and I had to take a gap for this semester so--
Brian Lehrer: Oh, no.
James: I can make up the funds to enroll in next semester.
Brian Lehrer: Wow. It actually made you take a gap. Oh, bureaucratic computer snafu, Ron.
Ron Lieber: Yes. This is what's known in the world of sociology and political science as "administrative burdens", the kind of hurdles and obstacles that exist to "try to keep citizens from cheating or getting more than they deserve" but ultimately serve to shut out people who are deserving. I'm really sorry to hear about this. I've got two pieces of advice for you.
First, there is a phone number that you can use to call the Department of Education to try to get them to help you with this. As you can imagine, it has been jammed up, but I ran some tests on it, it opens at eight o'clock, Eastern Time, you can find the number on the website.
If you call 7:58, two minutes before open, you navigate the phone tree, and then the lines open up right at 8:00 on the dot, and if you're somewhere in that 8:00 to 8:01 range, you will probably get into the queue and you will probably be able to speak to someone within 20 minutes. That's how long it took me. So try that.
The other thing that people sometimes forget to do is that there are thousands of financial aid administrators who work in financial aid offices, including at Montclair State, who are standing by as irritated as you are, but with about 100 times more knowledge than you have, hoping to help you. You can go there and you can attempt to enlist them. They may have seen the problem that you're having before and may have some ideas for how to help. That's just a terrible outcome, and I hope you find your way through to the Department of Education, so they can help you and your dad access the account.
Brian Lehrer: James, good luck. We're just about at a time, but we're getting more stories like that. Here's one in a text message. "I'm a parent of a junior. After many days, I finally got onto the new FAFSA 24 form, just long enough to partially complete but not sign the form because it bumped me off. I can't get back on. Despite numerous emails and calls to the helplines, the form remains locked and incomplete. Very frustrating. Thanks for any advice." Ron, we're going to have to leave it there, but I refer everybody back to his last answer because that's your best method of getting a human being to help you, right?
Ron Lieber: Yes, it's like trying to get rock concert tickets or something at this point, take your best shot.
Brian Lehrer: Ron Lieber, writes the Your Money column for The New York Times. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Stay tuned for Alison.
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