BETTENDORF, Iowa — As the school year comes to a close, Bettendorf High School's Career Center is surveying its students about their post-grad plans. This year, they added a question: asking students if FAFSA changes this year are impacting their decisions. Of the 120 seniors who've taken it so far, a third say it has.
"We've seen this year students that are coming in and saying, 'I thought that I was making a financially wise choice by choosing this school and now that I see the package, I don't know how I'm going to afford that,'"Haleigh Hoyt, Bettendorf's career readiness coordinator, said.
The Free Application for Federal Student Aid is used to determine eligibility for federal Pell Grants and colleges and states use it to award their own financial aid to students. An update to the form this year was meant to simplify it, but took months longer than expected, giving colleges less time to make financial aid offers and giving students less time to decide where to enroll. Delays were further exasperated when the U.S. Education Department in March discovered a calculation error in hundreds of thousands of applications sent to colleges that needed to be reprocessed.
Bettendorf senior Victoria Rivera is one of many being impacted by the delays even though she said she filled out the FAFSA form right away when it opened. She wants to attend the University of Iowa to study marketing. She just received her financial aid package three weeks ago.
"What really kind of made a difference was my financial aid from Iowa themselves was later than I expected and it wasn't nearly as much as I thought it was going to be," Rivera said. "I've been kind of scrambling to get scholarships and apply for all these different aids because it was less than I expected. And now I have less time than I normally would. So that was kind of stressful."
She's still working with her family to figure out how to move forward, but she's hopeful they'll be able to make her dream plan work.
Like many colleges and universities, Augustana College extended its reply date for students to June 1. It began sending its financial aid awards out to students beginning on March 26 and has been sending letters since then. The Vice President of Enrollment said every Augie applicant who submitted the FAFSA form should have heard back.
Kent Barnds expects another 400 to 700 students to submit the FAFSA.
"Unfortunately, a lot of those students and families who are impacted are those families who are first in their family to go to college," Barnds said. "So we really want to remain accessible to those students and that's why we extended until June 1, and we'll continue to work with those students."
The state of Illinois requires high school graduates to submit a FAFSA. Barnds said at this time last year, about 91,000 Illinois students had submitted the FAFSA, but this year that number is about 64,000.
"So that figure alone sort of, in my view, illustrates the negative impact of the poor rollout of the new simplified FAFSA, so there's a lot of ground to make up," he said.
Rivera's advice to next year's juniors is to start thinking about their financial options early.
The FAFSA deadline is set for June 30.