About a dozen students and their parents gathered in a computer lab at Wilson Community College to seek out Elizabeth Herrera, a college adviser with the nonprofit Casa Azul de Wilson.
She walked them through the online FAFSA form, bouncing between English and Spanish.
“Do you already have an account?” Herrera asked a student, then turns to her parents, and asks if they have created an account too.
The free application for federal student aid, or FAFSA, is one of the more complicated and consequential forms a high school senior will fill out. The form got a lot more complicated last year, when it began requiring both students and parents to create separate online accounts to submit their identification and tax information.
Although the FAFSA is complex, it’s also very valuable. The FAFSA is a gateway to an array of college financial aid — from private scholarships to federal grants and low-interest loans to pay for college.
The FAFSA would be a lot for a teenager to take on themselves. Herrera knows from personal experience.
“As a first-generation [college graduate] and Latina myself, my parents didn’t know how to fill out the FAFSA, so I had to just kind of figure it out by myself,” Herrera recalled.
Now as a trained college adviser, she hosts free bilingual workshops to help involve more students’ parents in the process.
“The parents also are also prioritizing these events because they know they’re going to have someone there that’s going to be able to speak to them in their language, and they’re going to be able to freely and safely ask their questions,” Herrera said.
One student at the workshop named Jackie knows the impact of that support. WUNC is only using Jackie’s first name because her parents are undocumented.
The first time Jackie submitted the FAFSA as a high school senior, something went wrong. That time, Jackie received help from her high school counselor, and thought she submitted her FAFSA correctly.
“But I guess she didn’t really know how to help with my specific circumstance,” Jackie said.
Then Jackie enrolled in college, and found out after the semester was underway that there was a problem with her financial aid.
“By the time I found out it was too late, and I ended up not even going to college as planned,” Jackie said.
The next year she reached out to Herrera’s nonprofit, Caza Azul de Wilson, for help.
“We went back, and we looked at it. I’m like, ‘Home girl, you filled it out incorrectly. Let’s fix this.’” Herrera said. “She got her financial aid and since then she’s been enrolled, and she’s now set to graduate.”
The FAFSA was a fiasco last year, but it’s been revamped again
Jackie is one of hundreds of students Herrera has assisted since founding Caza Azul with her older sister Flor Herrera-Picasso in 2021. Last year alone, Casa Azul helped students from 22 counties across North Carolina with their FAFSA.
“I have had parents who drive two hours from the Outer Banks to come have a sit-down appointment with me to complete their FAFSA,” Herrera said. “Then I had a student who was out in the western part of North Carolina who chose a zoom option.”
Winter is an especially busy time because the FAFSA opened in late November.
“Ever since FAFSA opened up, my phone has been blowing up,” Herrera said. “The students want help.”
The U.S. Department of Education overhauled the FAFSA last year, and it created a heap of problems — tech glitches, delayed decisions, and ultimately fewer students turning it in at all.
One of the big changes was that students and parents have to create their own online accounts. For the federal government to link the two, they have to match precisely, or the application won’t move forward.
“We have a lot of Latino parents who have two last names, and the student only puts one last name, and so then the parent won’t receive the information,” Herrera explained as an example.
Another change was that students whose parents don’t have a social security number — because they’re undocumented — had to submit additional information to prove their identity, like a passport. That delayed applications by months. This month, the U.S. Department of Education announced it won’t require that extra identification.
This year’s form is also more user friendly, and Herrera said it’s easier to finish in a single sitting.
Despite those changes, Herrera said some students from mixed status families are still afraid to apply for financial aid at all, because they don’t want to expose their parents’ immigration status to the federal government.
“We have North Carolina residents who would qualify for financial aid but are paying out-of-pocket because they’re scared of filling out this application,” Herrera said.
Fewer high school seniors completed the FAFSA last year, and fewer enrolled in college
Experts say all the recent changes to the FAFSA can be difficult to keep up with, and that makes community support from organizations like Casa Azul invaluable.
“We know the gold standard for increasing FAFSA completions is that hands-on support,” said Peter Granville, an education fellow at the Century Foundation who studies FAFSA trends. “Someone who can walk through it shoulder to shoulder with you — that’s what makes the difference.”
All the issues with the FAFSA last year meant fewer students completed it. In March, FAFSA completions were down by about 40 percent compared to the prior year. That gap closed throughout the spring, but students lost valuable time to make college decisions.
Granville’s research found that some students were affected more than others.
“In a year when almost every community saw decreased FAFSAs, communities whose populations are more Latino, saw some of the largest hits to FAFSA completion,” Granville said.
Communities with higher rates of poverty, fewer adults with college degrees, or a greater share of Black and Latino residents all had high drop offs.
National Student Clearinghouse Research Center
/
WUNC
In North Carolina, fewer high school students who graduated last May completed the FAFSA compared to the prior class. About the same share of North Carolina high school graduates didn’t go on to enroll in college this fall.
“That’s 9.9% fewer FAFSAs and 9.3% fewer freshmen enrollments,” Granville said, citing data from the National Student Clearinghouse. “That connection there is real.”
That statistic doesn’t surprise Jackie, the student who had trouble filling out the FAFSA form the first time. Now she’s back again, filling out the form with the help of Caza Azul, and hoping to transfer to a four-year college next year.
“We certainly hope, not only that students who are high school seniors now have an easier time completing the FAFSA, we also hope that students from last year who may have skipped college for a year or took a break from education are able to come back,” Granville said.
