FAFSA delays continue to disrupt admissions at some colleges

For years, Slippery Rock University has held its own in a slumping student market, and its leaders anticipate another strong fall aided by a third consecutive increase in first-year students.

But as that cautiously optimistic forecast was conveyed to school trustees in recent days, one unsettling statistic stood out.

With fall classes less than 10 weeks away, the total of new and returning students who have submitted a FAFSA — the form they need to secure financial aid — is still running 18%, or 640 students, behind last year’s rate.

It illustrates why a deeply flawed rollout of the federal government’s revised FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) has made this admission season unlike others for colleges nationwide, including Slippery Rock and its students.

It would be a bigger concern if other key indicators at the school weren’t so positive, said Mike May, vice president for enrollment management at Slippery Rock, a state-owned university of almost 8,400 students.

Deposits and requests for housing are up, he said. Signups for freshman orientation sessions are running at 97%, in line with past years.

“If we were lagging in any of those, my salt-and-pepper hair would be completely white,” May said.

Fallout from delays and data problems with the revamped FAFSA has moved from spring to summer. It promises an especially unpredictable July and August for some colleges trying to gauge what share of accepted students will actually show up in the fall.

Many of those students and their families lost crucial time in March and April to weigh competing college offers because FAFSA data — which colleges depend on to assess student need and send out financial aid offers — arrived from the federal government months late. A worry is that those students will make an ill-advised decision, or get discouraged and not enroll at all.

Delayed decisions

At Seton Hill University in Greensburg, half the normal number of FAFSA forms from first-year students have arrived, though deposits from accepted applicants are about the same as last year, said Brett Freshour, vice president for enrollment management.

“The process has been delayed vastly,” he said Thursday. “We expect many more decisions than usual over the summer.”

University of Pittsburgh trustees met publicly Friday but did not receive a fall enrollment update.

A statement released afterward in response to an inquiry did not mention student deposit rates but said a 5% decrease in FAFSA filings there is substantially better than the national average.

“While Fall 2024 class data will not be final until late September, the number of Fall 2024 first-year applications received to date for the Pittsburgh campus has exceeded last year’s record,” the statement read. “First-year student enrollment will likely exceed the 4,560 that enrolled for Fall 2023.”

Mandated by a 2020 act of Congress, the U.S. Department of Education began streamlining the complicated FAFSA, reducing from 108 to 46 the number of questions. Delays and technical issues persisted into this calendar year, drastically slowing the rate of students who filled out and submitted the form.

As recently as March, the number of students nationally who completed a FAFSA was 40% behind last year. It fueled anxiety both in college admissions offices and in high schools, given what the federal government and others say is a strong correlation between FAFSA completion and college enrollment.

High school seniors are 84% more likely to enroll in college right away if they have completed the form, according to the National College Attainment Network (NCAN). For students from lower-income households, the figure is even higher.

The pace of FAFSA submissions of late has accelerated but is still significantly off the 2023 pace, according to the NCAN and its FAFSA Tracker.

Approximately 45% of high school seniors had completed the form by the start of this month, down from roughly 52% in 2023.

Those 1.9 million completions as of early June are almost 13% behind last year’s pace.

In Pennsylvania, the completion rate of 44% is off by 12% from last year.

By mid-March, colleges and universities began receiving limited amounts of FAFSA data from the Education Department, but the flow was limited and the data itself sometimes flawed. As of early May, 28% of campuses had not begun to send out financial aid offers to students, according to a survey of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

As the normal May 1 deadline approached, schools worked with families to at least approximate the aid available to them. Many schools extended the deadline until May 15 — or even June 1 — and are still communicating with prospective students.

‘Financial crisis’

Angel B. Pérez, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, said he talks regularly with college presidents and enrollment vice presidents. The conversations reveal that some schools are running 20% to 30% short of their enrollment targets.

“That’s the number I’m hearing — 20 to 30% down. And that is a financial crisis for most campuses,’’ he said Friday.

The most vulnerable are small regional campuses, private and public, that already were facing enrollment and financial pressures and are just coming out from the pandemic.

“Then you have on top of that, the FAFSA debacle — and we’re very comfortable using that term,” he said. “You have hundreds of thousands of students who actually never completed the process.”

Small private colleges in particular depend on tuition to sustain campus operations.

“I think what you’re going to see over the summer is more and more of these institutions saying, ‘We tried really, really hard to combat the FAFSA issue. We haven’t won that battle, and as a result, we’re going to have to make some really difficult decisions about our budget next year,’ ” Perez said.

He said Delaware College of Art and Design, which recently announced it would close, cited enrollment woes exacerbated by FAFSA problems as a contributor.

But confusion and frustration with the process doesn’t automatically translate into fewer students. That has been the case so far at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe.

“We are actually at our freshman target. Our goal for this fall was 350. We are at 350 and have been holding there for about a week or so now,” said Heather Albright, dean of admissions for the school of 1,500 students. “Our transfer enrollment is on pace to exceed our target. The FAFSA implications have created a much later decision process for many families.”

Deposits spiked later than normal but now equal or exceed the 350 target. She said staff kept in extremely close contact with accepted students to keep them on track.

At Pennsylvania Western University, this region’s largest state-owned school, first-year student deposits are up by 33 this year vs. last year — 1,596 vs. 1,563 in 2023, spokeswoman Wendy Mackall said. First-year FAFSA submissions for admitted students are 2,507 vs. 3,310 at this time last year.

The State System of Higher Education said it’s too soon to provide FAFSA completion and fall deposit numbers for all 10 of its member universities. Spokesman Kevin Hensil stressed that it’s not too late to submit a FAFSA.

“The universities will help you, and we encourage families to stay in contact with universities to get the help they need,” he said.

The troubled rollout has overshadowed merits of the changes themselves. Campus officials have said the revised FAFSA is actually an improvement that streamlines the process and promotes more student aid.

“The real shame of it is we were all excited at Slippery Rock, and I’m sure at every school, when the better FAFSA was announced,” said May, the VP for enrollment management. “A lot of modeling was done. And basically the model at Slippery Rock and other public institutions is that more students were going to qualify for more aid.

“So if you were Pell-eligible, your Pell grants were going to increase,” he said. “And more students that would be students who would not have qualified for Pell Grants last year, would qualify this year.”