Local students adapt to severe federal delays
Apr. 14—Months of U.S. government bureaucratic problems have stressed out families and students across the country on the challenges of paying for higher education, including in St. Joseph.
The Free Application for Federal Student Aid is the centerpiece of a would-be college student's plan for figuring out how much tuition, fees, books, room and board will cost at a given campus, how many grants and scholarships they may qualify for, and how much they will need to obtain via student loans. FAFSA filings are designed to be processed within a week, but students across the country have instead seen no response from the U.S. Department of Education for months.
"I didn't think it was going to be an issue," said Tanner Ledford, who will soon graduate Central High School. "And then, I think I submitted it January or February or something like that. And it just kept getting delayed and delayed and delayed. I finally got results I think, a couple of weeks ago."
The problems are sourced to a botched rollout of changes to studentaid.gov, the online FAFSA portal.
"It definitely scares me a lot," said Vincent Nguyen, another graduating senior at Central. "It (has) definitely given me more stress."
Nguyen said he started his FAFSA in January and heard nothing from the government until late March.
"My sister, at the time she was applying to college, at the time she was deciding where she wanted to go, she knew by early February what aid she'd get," he said. "And it's now getting into mid-April for me, and I still have no clue."
Missouri Western State University director of financial aid Haley Lindsey shed additional light on the scale of the problem. Until the FAFSA is processed and returned at the federal level, higher education campuses cannot accurately tell their prospective students how much they will have to come up with themselves in order to attend class.
"For 2024-2025 students, FAFSA didn't even open until Dec. 31 of 2023," Lindsey said. "So there, you're already three months behind the norm. And then, when it did open, it was only for a few hours at a time, causing mass frustration of not being able to complete it fully. Students were kicked out of the system, there were errors, it wasn't letting them complete it in time. So the frustration continued."
In charging about $3,600 per year of tuition and fees for a full-time undergraduate student who is a Missouri resident, Missouri Western is considered more affordable than most four-year institutions; the national average is about $11,000, according to CollegeBoard, the administrator of the SAT preparatory exam. Still, the need for aid is common, and it starts with the FAFSA.
"We're now six to seven months behind schedule," Lindsey said. "Which, is not only frustrating again for the student but also financial aid offices throughout the country. We understand that frustration the students are in."
Jonathan Eckstein, a student at Bishop LeBlond High School, is in a better situation than most, as he has a plan to attend the University of St. Mary in Leavenworth, Kansas, without the need for any loans.
Even so, he said, FAFSA delays have made him nervous. Eckstein said he doesn't expect to have a concrete financial plan for college in place until May, when he had hoped to have it all made clear by February.
"It's kind of problematic," he said. "So, that increases the stress that I feel, but a lot of it's on my parents, since I'm still figuring out what's going on."
Marcus Clem can be reached at marcus.clem@newspressnow.com. Follow him on Twitter: @NPNowClem
