FAFSA fiasco threatens to push college dreams under red tape
When it comes to the future of children, how much is really determined by good academics? Sure, having good grades, a great social life, or maybe athletic skills can place you in a university or even your dream school, but there’s a fee that not even a good ACT score can cover. No matter if a student chooses in-or-out-of-state for the next four years, these second-time-freshmen will be plagued with fees for parking, supplies, and housing, while also having to pay the cost for their education. While scholarships are good, the cost for this future really depends on one government program: Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or better known as FAFSA. No matter the financial status of the student, this application is a guarantee for free money -- unless you come from the 1% and your parents faked your application into a university, but even then there’s a chance that those families tried applying for FAFSA. As helpful as FAFSA can be, why is it such a pain and, more importantly, why is it frowned upon?
These government programs really began with the help of President Lyndon B. Johnson and the passing of The Higher Education Act of 1965 -- yes, college wasn’t cheap back then, especially if you adjust the cost for inflation. Johnson’s act ensured the government was the primary provider for financial aid for students. Within the HEA, Title IV established the Education Opportunity Grant (EOG) Program, in which funds were allocated directly to colleges and universities. In 1972, the EOG Program eventually split to become the Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant program, or FSEOG, and the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant program, or BEOG (this was later renamed to the Pell Grant in 1980). The FSEOG program would just be the same as the original EOG program, in which funds were directly delivered to colleges, while the BEOG program delivered the funds to the students, not the universities. From there, more changes were made to the federal financial aid: the Middle Income Student Assistance Act of 1978 opened up the eligibility for subsidized loans to all, no matter the financial status.
While the HEA had given plenty of students opportunities to cover some of the costs of college, the act still wasn’t completely perfect: in 1992, Congress reevaluated the act and established a standardized federal form for all students, thus forming FAFSA. Through FAFSA, the federal government can determine the student’s eligibility for federal financial aid, granting the student federal grants, scholarships, and/or loans.
While students may earn free money or loans through FAFSA, it is just in fact an application full of questions about income information, personal information (both you and your parents), education, and more, rounding up to a total of 108. The correlation between students and their dreams of higher education has been linked to FAFSA, and with a program so essential, even required by some states, why was FAFSA met with so much backlash, especially this year?
Well, for starters, FAFSA launched late. Yes, even the federal government procrastinates and can’t meet deadlines -- maybe high schoolers should be elected into Congress. Usually, FAFSA opens on October 1. This year? January 1, 2024 -- two months later than usual. But even then, this date only was a soft launch of a brand new, simplified, FAFSA form. In this new form, there was the “Student Aid Index” to help estimate how much a family could afford to pay, more low and moderate income students have access to federal grants, reducing the eligibility for wealthier families, and families cannot get the “sibling discount” for having other children in college too.
Along with this, FAFSA uses old consumer price index figures from 2020 -- yes, an index from 4 years ago, which doesn’t account for the crazy inflation felt by the US economy in the past year. That means, unfortunately, students will get less financial aid than they actually deserve. This isn’t a couple dollars we are talking about, this is thousands of dollars stolen from students who need it.
On top of the federal government’s shortcoming of how much students should get, the Department of Education announced that “colleges won’t receive students’ applications for financial aid until at least early March.” As for this (second) delay, the department made the decision to fix the calculations for financial aid and the student’s eligibility. This means there is a chance so many students are going to miss deadlines for scholarships or the May 1 college decision deadline.
All these setbacks simply reverse the original goals of the HEA as students are unable to fill out these forms, money is stolen from them, and the federal government is making it simply difficult for students to reach that next step in their life and achieve higher education. If students are the next generation, why should they suffer with a pile of loans as inflation makes the quality of life terrible? Why should these students have to bear with the delays from the federal government, who is too busy pouring its money into policies outside of the country, robbing US citizens of their dreams?
What FAFSA proves is the federal government is no longer prioritizing the issues within its walls but instead letting the citizens drown in financial issues -- the federal government no longer is helping students, but instead is hurting them. These teenagers, faced with the expectation to fix the problems caused by the past, now can’t even get the proper aid they deserve for something as simple as education. In a day and age in which higher education is the only way to survive in this economy, students are robbed of that, meeting deadlines the federal government expects them to meet, all the while the government can’t reach their own.
by Ruby Pluchinsky
Published February 26 2024
Oshkosh West Index Volume 120 Issue V