The financial aid decisions that usually go out with acceptance letters are being delayed because of a later-than-expected rollout of a revised Free Application for Federal Student Aid, causing students to not receive their financial aid on time.
The Department of Education will not send any college students’ information to their financial aid until early March. The new and simplified FAFSA application caused the delay; which had the college administrators scrambling and the acceptance letters to be delayed.
Income exemption guidelines have yet to be fixed in the new FAFSA applications, leading to many students losing additional aid.
The usual opening date for FAFSA was pushed back to the end of December, which led to delays in the college student’s financial aid award letters.
Students will be able to start their financial aid applications by December 31, 2023. The delayed financial aid has raised concerns that fewer students will apply for aid to go to college.
Long Beach City College Financial Aid Specialist, Erandy Fuentes said, “With FAFSA being delayed, it has affected many students because most of them still haven’t received their financial aid package.”
This means that the students who haven’t received it, can not pick which college they want to go to, they don’t know how much aid they will receive.
Awards for the students have come in late which caused them to disburse the funds later than usual. Also, it affected them because they were backed up with helping students to apply for it and reviewing the ones that they had already received.
Fuentes explained that it affected the students in two different ways. The majority of students are still waiting on their financial aid packages and the second way is, that most colleges and universities will not receive the students’ FAFSA applications until March.
“Usually, I would receive my financial award letter in the last week in January, but since it was delayed, I haven’t received any information about it until the second week in February.” Stangia Herod said, a student at LBCC.
This has a lot of college students on edge because they don’t know if they will receive financial aid for the 2024-2025 academic year. This year’s FAFSA applications for colleges and universities have been delayed from four to six weeks.
Miguel Cardona, the Secretary of Education has stated that they will prioritize the lower resources campus for them to receive their students’ financial aid packages.
The FAFSA delays have affected millions of students and their families. It has stopped them from filing it and also processing it and sending out their financial aid packages to the colleges.
Hopefully, all the colleges receive the FAFSA applications, process each student’s financial aid packages, and send them out to the students.