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Problems with federal financial aid are preventing high school seniors from making plans for college.
By Naomi Schaefer Riley
Last weekend, NPR interviewed Vanessa Cordova Ramirez, a high school senior from Brooklyn who had been offered admission by her top college choices, including St. Joseph’s University, Manhattan College and St. John’s.
Unfortunately, Ramirez won’t be going to those schools. She has a job and her parents are able to help a little, but that money combined won’t be enough to cover the cost of private schools. So she’ll probably end up at the City University of New York instead because she, like millions of other students, is still waiting to hear about financial aid offers thanks to months of delays by the Department of Education.
Congress passed legislation to simplify the federal financial aid form (known as FAFSA) in 2020, with a plan to implement the new form for the high school class of 2024. Despite the long lead time, the department was unprepared.
As NPR notes, the application “opened about three months later than normal, and was further delayed when the department failed to take inflation into account.”
Further, as the report noted, “Schools rely on the department’s calculations to know how much federal financial aid a student qualifies for. Once they receive that data, schools offer scholarships or grants and send the full package to students, normally a few days or weeks after an acceptance. But this year, the aid letters never came.”
And now students are having to choose a college without concrete aid offers on the table.
It is striking how little outrage this situation has provoked. I can only imagine that if this had happened under the previous administration there would be wall-to-wall coverage about how Republicans don’t care about poor people going to college. But in this case, it just seems like a big oopsie. Where are the congressional hearings? I can think of a few million families who would tune into C-Span for those.
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