FAFSA issues hit Iowa colleges; students still struggle to pay tuition

AMES — While more postmortem is needed to determine the full impact of the massive delays and confusion that plagued last semester’s botched rollout of the government’s revised Free Application for Federal Student Aid, admissions directors at Iowa’s public universities last week detailed the consequences for their campuses, their applicants and their returning students.

“We have identified approximately 200 current students on our campus to date who have completed the FAFSA, who have received an offer of financial aid, but who are still having difficulty disbursing their financial aid and who are unable to pay their tuition,” Kirk Kluver, assistant provost and executive director of Admissions at the University of Iowa, told the Board of Trustees at its meeting last week in Ames.

“We have worked with them individually to resolve these issues and have waived all late fees associated with the delay in paying their tuition.”

Kluver did not provide details about the students who are still struggling to secure financial aid, or the specific issues they face. However, admissions officials for Iowa’s public university system said that the delays, confusion, obstacles and problems with the FAFSA appeared to impact out-of-state and international applicants more than Iowa residents.

That was evident in the higher number of nonresidents who waited later in the cycle — until funding and scholarships were awarded — to accept offers of admission from universities, officials said.

And at the University of Northern Iowa, which serves a higher percentage of low-income and first-generation families, “the delays really impacted our students,” said Terri Crumley, UNI’s director of admissions.

“Our counselors tend to reach out to Pell Grant recipients in a special way because we know they need extra help,” she said. “And not having that data to know who those students were, not knowing which students filed a FAFSA and which students didn’t file a FAFSA, was really problematic for quite a while.”

Making up for the delays took a lot of work at all three campuses, including Iowa State University, where Assistant Vice President and Executive Director of Admissions Katherine Suski said, “The FAFSA delays had a number of implications going forward.”

“Until we had financial data, we couldn’t award many grants to the university.”

On the positive side, applicants from Iowa appear to respond differently than most applicants nationwide, given the lower tuition rates at public institutions for in-state students.

“My interpretation is that students were more willing to commit without financial aid packages because of the strong value Iowa State offered as a Regents university,” she said. “Even without knowing their financial aid awards, they knew their Iowa State education would be affordable.”

Still, with about 40 percent of Regent University’s students coming from outside Iowa — the highest percentage in at least a decade — the influx of delayed decisions from nonresidents has impacted campuses in several ways, including college enrollment and budget planning, housing management, course administration and orientation attendance.

‘Late nights and weekends’

While the FAFSA opened to the public on October 1, 2022 in the previous cycle (student information was sent to institutions in November 2022 and awards were sent out in mid-February 2023), this latest FAFSA cycle did not open until December 30, 2023, and even then there were problems.

Campuses did not receive information about the students until mid-March, making it impossible to award the prizes at the usual time.

“If we go back to early March, we still hadn’t received financial aid reports from high school seniors,” said the UI’s Kluver, who said his campus had a record number of applications and thousands of accepted admission offers but had no idea how many people would actually enroll after the aid offers were sent out.

“There were weeks in the spring when we were concerned that we would under-enroll students, and there were weeks when we were genuinely concerned that we would over-enroll students, which would create significant challenges on our campus with regard to housing, orientation and course availability,” Kluver told the regents.

Finally he said, “It all worked out.”

The UI has reached its ‘optimal’ target of 5,208 first-year students and 1,085 transfer students, bringing the total number of students on campus to 30,779 and a steady five-year growth plan towards 33,000 students.

“But our people have been working through several nights and weekends to provide financial assistance as quickly as possible,” he said.

Kluver reported that the university received its first batch of student financial information on March 12. The team sent out the first round of financial aid offers on April 16.

“That was a record turnover time for our campus,” he said. “And we believe we are the first Big Ten university to get financial aid offers into the hands of students.”

ISU — which ultimately enrolled a freshman class of 5,906 students and 30,432 total graduate students — assembled an all-hands-on-deck editing team of more than 35 financial aid and admissions staff in late April to send award letters to approximately 16,000 admitted freshmen.

According to Chad Olson, director of student financial aid, they had all the envelopes filled and sealed within a few hours.

If it weren’t for the long hours, the extra effort and the flexibility, the UI’s Kluver said, “I have no doubt the impact of the delays could have been very serious.”

‘No longer an advantage for those families’

Nationally, the number of high school seniors filing a FAFSA in 2024 dropped 9 percent year-over-year. In Iowa, the year-over-year drop was nearly 10 percent, according to the National College Attainment Network.

Through Sept. 13, 52 percent of 2024 high school seniors nationwide had completed a FAFSA, down from 58.4 percent during the same period in 2023. Statewide, 49 percent of Iowa’s 2024 seniors have completed a FAFSA, while the college admissions office reported an 8 percent increase in freshman applications.

And despite everything, Kluver notices that there is a certain consistency among the enrolled students on his campus.

“If you look at our freshman class that we enrolled, 87-86 percent of those students filed a FAFSA,” he said. “That number was up from 87 percent last year. We’re also pleased to see the percentage of our freshmen receiving a Pell Grant increasing; 19.3 percent of our incoming freshmen received a Pell Grant. That was up from 17.4 percent of our freshman class last year.”

College admissions officials worried that the FAFSA problems would hit certain groups particularly hard, including students who want to be the first in their families to attend college.

“So we were very pleased that we were able to retain 20 percent of the first-in-family-to-college in our entering class this year,” Kluver said. “We also had some real concerns about retention. As students think about coming back for their sophomore year, their financial aid offer would have a significant impact on that decision. And with the work of our team, we were able to make financial aid offers to returning students in April.”

Admissions officials told the regents they were concerned about how some changes to the FAFSA formula could affect specific populations they serve, including those with agricultural and small business assets.

“There were certainly concerns, particularly with farm and small business assets, that there would be students who would have been eligible in the past who no longer would,” said Kluver, who also raised concerns about changes to sibling benefits in college.

“We were really concerned about that — that there was no longer a benefit for those families for multiple kids in college,” he said. “That would particularly impact current students who may have received some form of federal aid that would no longer be eligible.

“And we’ve certainly had a number of those students this year in our financial aid offices looking for solutions when they had a new formula and their aid had been significantly reduced.”

All three admissions officials said they would like to return to a standard timeline for the new cycle. The FAFSA is expected to open on Dec. 1, with students receiving information later that month.

“We will feel very good about this process when we receive the first student financial aid reports in mid-December,” Kluver said.

Vanessa Miller writes about higher education for The Gazette.

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