This story was reported and written by VPM News.
Some Virginia students planning to attend college this fall are still waiting on accurate financial aid offers from colleges they’ve applied to, due to glitches in a new version of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, some of those glitches won’t be resolved before students start classes this fall . It’s a problem that has complicated the lives of students and parents, school counselors, and college administrators for months.
Joshua White helps students at Armstrong High School in Richmond fill out the FAFSA and compare financial offers from colleges. But this year, many of those offers didn’t come in until after students had graduated at the end of May — meaning that students missed out on scholarships.
That means some students who hoped to use scholarship money to attend a four-year university in the fall have had to opt for community college or take a gap year instead, White said.
“There was a lot of heartbreak for a lot of families,” White said.
Because he wasn’t able to review financial offer letters with students during the school year, White didn’t get much of a summer break either.
“There was probably a phone call every single day from someone saying, ‘Hey, Mr. White, I need help understanding what my financial aid award letter is saying,’ or ‘Oh, hey, Mr. White, can you actually FaceTime me to see what's going on with my FAFSA,’” White said.
The calls about FAFSA errors and glitches were constant. For months, students with parents who aren’t U.S. citizens or don’t have Social Security numbers couldn’t submit the federal aid application.
Rahmah Gibson, a counselor at Richmond’s Thomas Jefferson High School, said the FAFSA delays and errors discouraged some students from considering college at all. The FAFSA completion rate in Virginia for this year is around 10% lower than last year’s rate.
“They heard the horror stories,” Gibson said. “They said, ‘Well, I'm not going to do that, I could get a job.’”
‘FAFSA fiasco’
College financial aid officers are frustrated because they’re at the mercy of the federal government and its new systems. Ashley Miller, Old Dominion University’s associate vice president for enrollment management, called the situation “the FAFSA fiasco.”
“We're still receiving files from the Department of Education, and our team is still working nights and weekends to turn those around to the students,” Miller said. “And I think we'll be doing that up until, frankly, probably the first week of classes.”
There’s a long list of technical errors in the new FAFSA system that haven’t been resolved. For example, there’s no way for college officials to submit a batch of student corrections to the federal government; instead, colleges have to submit corrections manually for individual students — which is time-intensive. That issue won’t be fixed by this fall semester, according to the DOE.
Additionally, only one person from a college has access to log into the new system and make the corrections.
“The joke is, if it's illogical, it's now logical,” said Shannon Eskam, financial aid director for the Virginia Military Institute.
Multiple colleges and universities pushed back deadlines by at least a month for students to commit to attend in the fall. The University of Mary Washington, in Fredericksburg, moved its deadline for students to commit to attending in the fall to June 1.
Melissa Yakabouski, UMW’s dean of admissions, said the university wanted to give students more time to make a decision about where to go to school – especially because many students didn’t receive a financial aid package until April, and some were waiting on aid letters to schedule campus tours.
“We had way more visitors than we normally would in the month of May,” Yakabouski said about a time of year when the campus is normally a ghost town.
‘We just have to get through this’
18-year-old Chandler Holeman plans to attend ODU this fall — but wasn’t able to make the decision formally as early as she planned.
“Even though I had narrowed down all my colleges to the top five, I hadn't gotten any financial aid letters until April,” Holeman said.
Many recent high school graduates like Alex Kremsreiter, who plans to attend the University of Virginia this fall,were in a similar situation.
“I had to make a decision,” Kremsreiter said, “but I couldn't make a decision until I knew about money.”
Though many students have received financial aid packages by now, others are still waiting on aid offers from colleges across the commonwealth. Brad Barnett, James Madison University’s director of financial aid, said there’s a significant number of students in that situation at JMU.
“The closer we get [to the start of the school year], the more compressed the timetable gets, and the more stress that you feel from some of your parents and students who are stuck in this process,” Barnett said. “There’s bills that have to be paid to the university, there's rent that people have to pay, there’s books and computers and things that have to be purchased.”
The delays in getting financial aid offers to students means that some may not have the money in hand by the time classes start. And that could have consequences — including some students having to drop out if they can’t make payments on time.
Barnett said his office has been communicating with other campus offices — like the business office — in case some families have trouble meeting financial deadlines this fall.
Barnett is also concerned that enrollment figures could be inflated, with some students potentially committing to multiple schools because of all of the uncertainty about aid offers. That could mean fewer students than expected actually show up on college campuses this fall.
“How many ‘ghost students’ will we see this year? I don't know,” Barnett said. “We haven't seen anything like this before.”
Schools are also unsure what enrollment will look like in fall 2025, because the federal government is taking much longer than expected to resolve these technical problems. And with next fall’s application cycle already open at many schools, counselors and colleges are encouraging students to start that application early.
However, education officials like Barnett say once all of the errors have been resolved, applying for financial aid should be a much easier process. After all, the goal of the FAFSA overhaul was to simplify the form — automatically pulling in tax data from the IRS with the touch of a button, so students and families no longer have to input all of that information themselves.
“We are not going to be stuck here forever,” Barnett said. “We just have to get through this. And then I'm confident that on the other side, this is going to be better.”
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