As Enrollment in Online College Grows, Students Wonder: Why Does it Cost So Much?
College Credit for Working Your Job? Walmart and McDonald’s Are Trying It
Issues With FAFSA Could Mean Many Students Don't Go to College in the Fall
Long-awaited FAFSA fix means students from immigrant families can finally finish aid applications
How Thoughtful Post-Secondary Planning Can Raise Expectations for Students in Special Education
Yet another FAFSA problem: Many noncitizens can't fill it out
Dartmouth will again require SAT, ACT scores. Other colleges won't necessarily follow
A new FAFSA setback means many college financial aid offers won't come until April
The Education Department says it will fix its $1.8 billion FAFSA mistake
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"content": "\u003cp>Emma Bittner considered getting a master’s degree in public health at a university near her home in Austin, Texas. But the in-person program cost tens of thousands of dollars more than she had hoped to spend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So she checked out master’s degrees she could pursue remotely, on her laptop, which she was sure would be much cheaper.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The price for the same degree online was … just as much. Or more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m, like, what makes this worth it?” said Bittner, 25. “Why does it cost that much if I don’t get meetings face-to-face with the professor or have the experience in person?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among the surprising answers is that colleges and universities are using online higher education to subsidize everything else they do, a survey of the people who manage these programs finds. And some schools are spending significant amounts on marketing and advertising for it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The result is that 83% of online programs in higher education \u003ca href=\"https://www.qualitymatters.org/sites/default/files/research-docs-pdfs/QM-Eduventures-EDUCAUSE-CHLOE%209-Report-2024.pdf#page=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">cost students as much as or more than\u003c/a> the in-person versions, according to an annual survey of college online-learning officers. The survey was conducted by Eduventures, an arm of the higher education consulting company Encoura, for the nonprofits Quality Matters and Educause.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>About a quarter of universities and colleges even tack on an additional “distance learning” fee, the survey found.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Universities and colleges “see online higher education as an opportunity to make money and use it for whatever they want to make money for,” said Kevin Carey, vice president of education and work at the left-leaning think tank New America.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Widespread confusion about costs\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Bittner’s confusion about the price is widespread. Eighty percent of Americans think online learning after high school \u003ca href=\"https://www.newamerica.org/education-policy/reports/varying-degrees-2024/explore-the-data\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">should cost less\u003c/a> than in-person programs, according to a 2024 survey of 1,705 adults by New America.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After all, technology has reduced prices in many other industries. And online courses don’t require classrooms or other physical facilities and can theoretically be taught to a much larger number of students, creating economies of scale.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, in addition to using online revenue to help pay for other things, universities say they have had to spend more than they anticipated on advising and support for online students, whose academic performance, on average, lags behind their in-person counterparts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The concerns about cost come as online higher education is projected to pass an impressive if little-noticed milestone this year: For the first time, \u003ca href=\"https://www.encoura.org/resources/wake-up-call/higher-ed-predictions-for-2025-part-1-an-online-milestone-and-trouble-ahead-for-the-us-department-of-education/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">more American college students will be learning entirely online\u003c/a> than will be learning 100% in person.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s according to an estimate made in January by Richard Garrett, Eduventures’ chief research officer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among the reasons: Learning online offers scheduling flexibility for people also juggling jobs and families. It’s being particularly pushed for professional certificates and graduate degrees. And the online sector got a boost from the COVID-19 pandemic, when just about everyone was forced to learn remotely.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, more institutions seeing the revenue potential are scrambling to get in on it.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>How much an online degree can cost\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Bringing down the price of a degree “was certainly a key part of the appeal” when online higher education began, Garrett said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Online was going to be disruptive,” he added. “It was supposed to widen access. And it would reduce the price. But it hasn’t played out that way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, online instruction for in-state students at four-year public universities \u003ca href=\"https://educationdata.org/cost-of-online-education-vs-traditional-education\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">costs, on average, $341 a credit\u003c/a>, the independent Education Data Initiative finds. That’s higher than the average $325 a credit for face-to-face tuition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This adds up to about $41,000 for a degree online, compared with about $39,000 in tuition for a degree obtained in person.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two-thirds of private four-year universities and colleges with online programs \u003ca href=\"https://www.qualitymatters.org/sites/default/files/research-docs-pdfs/QM-Eduventures-EDUCAUSE-CHLOE%209-Report-2024.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">charge more for them\u003c/a> than for their face-to-face classes, according to the survey of online managers. For private universities and colleges, the average tuition for online learning comes to \u003ca href=\"https://educationdata.org/cost-of-online-education-vs-traditional-education\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">$516 per credit\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Community colleges collectively \u003ca href=\"https://www.encoura.org/resources/wake-up-call/community-colleges-gaining-ground-in-online-education-what-it-means-for-universities/?mcparam=00Q0z00001TfeTCEAZ&utm_source=marketing-cloud&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WUC+2024-10-08+Community+Colleges+Gaining+Ground+in+Online+Education+What+It+Means+for+Universities&utm_id=749338\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">enroll the largest number\u003c/a> of students who learn entirely online. The Eduventures survey found that all the community colleges surveyed charge those students the same as or more than their in-person counterparts. That’s likely because community college tuition overall is already comparatively low, Garrett explains.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Startup costs and technological hurdles\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Social media is riddled with angry comments about this, with many students echoing Bittner’s questions about how learning online could possibly cost more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Online education officers respond that their programs face steep startup costs and need expensive technology specialists and infrastructure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a separate survey of faculty members by the consulting firm Ithaka S+R, 80% said it took them \u003ca href=\"https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/faculty-collaboration-and-technology-in-the-liberal-arts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">as much time, or more\u003c/a>, to plan and develop online courses as it did in-person ones because of the need to incorporate new technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Online programs also need to provide faculty members who are available for office hours, plus online advisers and other resources, exclusively to support online students. For the same reasons, many online providers have put caps on enrollment, limiting those expected economies of scale.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You still need advisers, you still need a writing center, a tutoring center, and now you have to provide those services for students who are at a distance,” said Dylan Barth, vice president of innovation and programs at the Online Learning Consortium, which represents online education providers.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Part of the higher education playbook\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Still, \u003ca href=\"https://www.qualitymatters.org/sites/default/files/research-docs-pdfs/QM-Eduventures-EDUCAUSE-CHLOE%209-Report-2024.pdf#page=17\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">60%\u003c/a> of public universities and more than half of private universities are taking in more money from online education than they spend on it, the online managers’ survey found. About half said they put the money back into their institutions’ general operating budgets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Such cross subsidies have long been a part of higher education’s financial strategy, under which students in classes or fields that cost less to teach generally subsidize their counterparts in courses or disciplines that cost more. English majors subsidize their engineering classmates, for example. Big first-year lecture classes subsidize small senior seminars. Graduate students often subsidize undergrads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Online education is another revenue stream from a different market,” said Duha Altindag, an associate professor of economics at Auburn University who has studied online programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Universities “are not trying to use technology to become more efficient. They’re just layering it on top of the existing model,” said New America’s Carey, who has been critical of some online education approaches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another page that online managers have borrowed from higher education’s traditional pricing playbook is that consumers often equate high prices with high quality, especially at brand-name colleges and universities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Market success and reputation can support higher prices,” Eduventures’ Garrett said. It’s not what online courses cost to provide that determines the price, in other words, but how much consumers are willing to pay.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With online programs competing for customers across the U.S., rather than for those within commuting distance of campus or willing to relocate, at least some universities and colleges are spending large amounts on marketing and advertising.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Lower grades and reduced chances of graduating\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, online students — while they’re paying the same as or more than their in-person counterparts — have generally poorer success rates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Online students get \u003ca href=\"https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/01623737241274802\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">lower grades\u003c/a> than those in face-to-face education, according to research by Altindag and colleagues at American University and the University of Southern Mississippi — though the gap is narrowing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students online are more likely to have to withdraw from or repeat courses and are less likely to graduate on time, these researchers found, which further increases the cost.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And students who learn entirely online at any level are less likely to have graduated within eight years than students in general.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lower-income students fare especially poorly. Researchers say this is in part because many come from low-resourced public high schools or are balancing their classes with work or family responsibilities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If they do receive degrees, \u003ca href=\"https://www.encoura.org/resources/wake-up-call/the-big-reveal-new-financial-value-transparency-rules-and-online-programs/?mcparam=00Q0z00001TfeTCEAZ&utm_source=marketing-cloud&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WUC+2024-10-01+The+Big+Reveal+-+New+Financial+Value+Transparency+Rules+%26+Online+Programs&utm_id=737400\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">online-only students earn more\u003c/a> than their entirely in-person counterparts for the first year after college, Eduventures finds — perhaps because they tend to be older than traditional-age students, researchers speculated. But that advantage disappears within four years, when in-person graduates overtake them.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>For online graduates, challenges in the job market\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>For all the growth in online higher education, some employers appear reluctant to hire graduates of it, according to still other research from the University of Louisville. Employment applicants who listed an online, as opposed to in-person, degree were \u003ca href=\"https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0019793919899943?journalCode=ilra\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">about half as likely\u003c/a> to get a callback for the job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How strongly consumers feel that online higher education should cost less than the in-person kind was evident in lawsuits brought against schools that continued to charge full tuition even after going remote during the COVID-19 pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students had part of their payments refunded under multimillion-dollar settlements with the University of Chicago, Pennsylvania State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Maine System and others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet consumers keep signing on. For all the complaints about remote learning at the time, its momentum \u003ca href=\"https://onedtech.philhillaa.com/p/fall-2023-ipeds-data-profile-of-us-higher-ed-online-education\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">seems to have accelerated\u003c/a> since the pandemic, according to an analysis of federal data by Phil Hill, an education technology consultant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sixty percent of campus online officers say that online sections of classes tend to fill first, and nearly half say online student numbers are outpacing in-person enrollment.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Signs of improvement\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>There have been some widely cited examples of online programs with dramatically lower tuition, such as a \u003ca href=\"https://omscs.gatech.edu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">$7,000 online master’s degree\u003c/a> in computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology (compared with the estimated nearly $43,000 for the two-year in-person version). That program has attracted thousands of students and a few copycats.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are also signs that prices could fall. Competition is intensifying from national nonprofit providers such as Western Governors University, which charges a comparatively low average of \u003ca href=\"https://www.wgu.edu/financial-aid-tuition.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">$8,300 per year\u003c/a>, and Southern New Hampshire University, whose undergraduate price per credit hour is a slightly lower-than-average (for online courses) \u003ca href=\"https://www.snhu.edu/tuition-and-financial-aid/online\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">$330\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also, universities have started cutting their ties with for-profit middlemen, called online program managers, which take big cuts of \u003ca href=\"https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED609143.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">up to 80%\u003c/a> of revenues. Nearly 150 such deals \u003ca href=\"https://www.validatedinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/OPM-Market-Insights-September-2024-v1.0.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">were canceled or ended and not renewed\u003c/a> in 2023, the most recent year for which the information is available, the market research firm Validated Insights reported.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another thing that could lower prices: As more online programs go live, they no longer require high up-front investment — just periodic updating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It is possible to save money on downstream costs if you offer the same course over a number of years,” said Justin Ortagus, director of the University of Florida’s Institute of Higher Education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While that survey of online officers found a \u003ca href=\"https://www.encoura.org/resources/wake-up-call/online-program-pricing-new-data-from-the-chloe-9-survey/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tiny decline\u003c/a> in the proportion of universities charging more for online than in-person classes, the drop was statistically insignificant, however. And as their enrollments are \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/the-impact-of-this-is-economic-decline/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">projected to plummet\u003c/a>, institutions increasingly need the revenue from online programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Emma Bittner, in Texas, ended up in a new online master’s program in public health from a private university that was cheaper than the others she’d found.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her day job is at the national nonprofit Young Invincibles, which pushes for reforms in higher education, health care and economic security for young Americans. And she still doesn’t understand the online pricing model.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m so confused about it. Even in the program I’m in now, you don’t get the same access to stuff as an in-person student,” she said. “What are you putting into it that costs so much?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about the \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/as-online-higher-education-hits-a-milestone-why-does-it-still-cost-so-much/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>cost of online higher education\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>The Hechinger Report\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Emma Bittner considered getting a master’s degree in public health at a university near her home in Austin, Texas. But the in-person program cost tens of thousands of dollars more than she had hoped to spend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So she checked out master’s degrees she could pursue remotely, on her laptop, which she was sure would be much cheaper.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The price for the same degree online was … just as much. Or more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m, like, what makes this worth it?” said Bittner, 25. “Why does it cost that much if I don’t get meetings face-to-face with the professor or have the experience in person?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among the surprising answers is that colleges and universities are using online higher education to subsidize everything else they do, a survey of the people who manage these programs finds. And some schools are spending significant amounts on marketing and advertising for it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The result is that 83% of online programs in higher education \u003ca href=\"https://www.qualitymatters.org/sites/default/files/research-docs-pdfs/QM-Eduventures-EDUCAUSE-CHLOE%209-Report-2024.pdf#page=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">cost students as much as or more than\u003c/a> the in-person versions, according to an annual survey of college online-learning officers. The survey was conducted by Eduventures, an arm of the higher education consulting company Encoura, for the nonprofits Quality Matters and Educause.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>About a quarter of universities and colleges even tack on an additional “distance learning” fee, the survey found.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Universities and colleges “see online higher education as an opportunity to make money and use it for whatever they want to make money for,” said Kevin Carey, vice president of education and work at the left-leaning think tank New America.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Widespread confusion about costs\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Bittner’s confusion about the price is widespread. Eighty percent of Americans think online learning after high school \u003ca href=\"https://www.newamerica.org/education-policy/reports/varying-degrees-2024/explore-the-data\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">should cost less\u003c/a> than in-person programs, according to a 2024 survey of 1,705 adults by New America.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After all, technology has reduced prices in many other industries. And online courses don’t require classrooms or other physical facilities and can theoretically be taught to a much larger number of students, creating economies of scale.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, in addition to using online revenue to help pay for other things, universities say they have had to spend more than they anticipated on advising and support for online students, whose academic performance, on average, lags behind their in-person counterparts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The concerns about cost come as online higher education is projected to pass an impressive if little-noticed milestone this year: For the first time, \u003ca href=\"https://www.encoura.org/resources/wake-up-call/higher-ed-predictions-for-2025-part-1-an-online-milestone-and-trouble-ahead-for-the-us-department-of-education/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">more American college students will be learning entirely online\u003c/a> than will be learning 100% in person.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s according to an estimate made in January by Richard Garrett, Eduventures’ chief research officer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among the reasons: Learning online offers scheduling flexibility for people also juggling jobs and families. It’s being particularly pushed for professional certificates and graduate degrees. And the online sector got a boost from the COVID-19 pandemic, when just about everyone was forced to learn remotely.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, more institutions seeing the revenue potential are scrambling to get in on it.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>How much an online degree can cost\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Bringing down the price of a degree “was certainly a key part of the appeal” when online higher education began, Garrett said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Online was going to be disruptive,” he added. “It was supposed to widen access. And it would reduce the price. But it hasn’t played out that way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, online instruction for in-state students at four-year public universities \u003ca href=\"https://educationdata.org/cost-of-online-education-vs-traditional-education\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">costs, on average, $341 a credit\u003c/a>, the independent Education Data Initiative finds. That’s higher than the average $325 a credit for face-to-face tuition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This adds up to about $41,000 for a degree online, compared with about $39,000 in tuition for a degree obtained in person.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two-thirds of private four-year universities and colleges with online programs \u003ca href=\"https://www.qualitymatters.org/sites/default/files/research-docs-pdfs/QM-Eduventures-EDUCAUSE-CHLOE%209-Report-2024.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">charge more for them\u003c/a> than for their face-to-face classes, according to the survey of online managers. For private universities and colleges, the average tuition for online learning comes to \u003ca href=\"https://educationdata.org/cost-of-online-education-vs-traditional-education\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">$516 per credit\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Community colleges collectively \u003ca href=\"https://www.encoura.org/resources/wake-up-call/community-colleges-gaining-ground-in-online-education-what-it-means-for-universities/?mcparam=00Q0z00001TfeTCEAZ&utm_source=marketing-cloud&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WUC+2024-10-08+Community+Colleges+Gaining+Ground+in+Online+Education+What+It+Means+for+Universities&utm_id=749338\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">enroll the largest number\u003c/a> of students who learn entirely online. The Eduventures survey found that all the community colleges surveyed charge those students the same as or more than their in-person counterparts. That’s likely because community college tuition overall is already comparatively low, Garrett explains.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Startup costs and technological hurdles\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Social media is riddled with angry comments about this, with many students echoing Bittner’s questions about how learning online could possibly cost more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Online education officers respond that their programs face steep startup costs and need expensive technology specialists and infrastructure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a separate survey of faculty members by the consulting firm Ithaka S+R, 80% said it took them \u003ca href=\"https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/faculty-collaboration-and-technology-in-the-liberal-arts/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">as much time, or more\u003c/a>, to plan and develop online courses as it did in-person ones because of the need to incorporate new technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Online programs also need to provide faculty members who are available for office hours, plus online advisers and other resources, exclusively to support online students. For the same reasons, many online providers have put caps on enrollment, limiting those expected economies of scale.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You still need advisers, you still need a writing center, a tutoring center, and now you have to provide those services for students who are at a distance,” said Dylan Barth, vice president of innovation and programs at the Online Learning Consortium, which represents online education providers.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Part of the higher education playbook\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Still, \u003ca href=\"https://www.qualitymatters.org/sites/default/files/research-docs-pdfs/QM-Eduventures-EDUCAUSE-CHLOE%209-Report-2024.pdf#page=17\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">60%\u003c/a> of public universities and more than half of private universities are taking in more money from online education than they spend on it, the online managers’ survey found. About half said they put the money back into their institutions’ general operating budgets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Such cross subsidies have long been a part of higher education’s financial strategy, under which students in classes or fields that cost less to teach generally subsidize their counterparts in courses or disciplines that cost more. English majors subsidize their engineering classmates, for example. Big first-year lecture classes subsidize small senior seminars. Graduate students often subsidize undergrads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Online education is another revenue stream from a different market,” said Duha Altindag, an associate professor of economics at Auburn University who has studied online programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Universities “are not trying to use technology to become more efficient. They’re just layering it on top of the existing model,” said New America’s Carey, who has been critical of some online education approaches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another page that online managers have borrowed from higher education’s traditional pricing playbook is that consumers often equate high prices with high quality, especially at brand-name colleges and universities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Market success and reputation can support higher prices,” Eduventures’ Garrett said. It’s not what online courses cost to provide that determines the price, in other words, but how much consumers are willing to pay.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With online programs competing for customers across the U.S., rather than for those within commuting distance of campus or willing to relocate, at least some universities and colleges are spending large amounts on marketing and advertising.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Lower grades and reduced chances of graduating\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, online students — while they’re paying the same as or more than their in-person counterparts — have generally poorer success rates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Online students get \u003ca href=\"https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/01623737241274802\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">lower grades\u003c/a> than those in face-to-face education, according to research by Altindag and colleagues at American University and the University of Southern Mississippi — though the gap is narrowing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students online are more likely to have to withdraw from or repeat courses and are less likely to graduate on time, these researchers found, which further increases the cost.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And students who learn entirely online at any level are less likely to have graduated within eight years than students in general.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lower-income students fare especially poorly. Researchers say this is in part because many come from low-resourced public high schools or are balancing their classes with work or family responsibilities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If they do receive degrees, \u003ca href=\"https://www.encoura.org/resources/wake-up-call/the-big-reveal-new-financial-value-transparency-rules-and-online-programs/?mcparam=00Q0z00001TfeTCEAZ&utm_source=marketing-cloud&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WUC+2024-10-01+The+Big+Reveal+-+New+Financial+Value+Transparency+Rules+%26+Online+Programs&utm_id=737400\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">online-only students earn more\u003c/a> than their entirely in-person counterparts for the first year after college, Eduventures finds — perhaps because they tend to be older than traditional-age students, researchers speculated. But that advantage disappears within four years, when in-person graduates overtake them.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>For online graduates, challenges in the job market\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>For all the growth in online higher education, some employers appear reluctant to hire graduates of it, according to still other research from the University of Louisville. Employment applicants who listed an online, as opposed to in-person, degree were \u003ca href=\"https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0019793919899943?journalCode=ilra\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">about half as likely\u003c/a> to get a callback for the job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How strongly consumers feel that online higher education should cost less than the in-person kind was evident in lawsuits brought against schools that continued to charge full tuition even after going remote during the COVID-19 pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students had part of their payments refunded under multimillion-dollar settlements with the University of Chicago, Pennsylvania State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Maine System and others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet consumers keep signing on. For all the complaints about remote learning at the time, its momentum \u003ca href=\"https://onedtech.philhillaa.com/p/fall-2023-ipeds-data-profile-of-us-higher-ed-online-education\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">seems to have accelerated\u003c/a> since the pandemic, according to an analysis of federal data by Phil Hill, an education technology consultant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sixty percent of campus online officers say that online sections of classes tend to fill first, and nearly half say online student numbers are outpacing in-person enrollment.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Signs of improvement\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>There have been some widely cited examples of online programs with dramatically lower tuition, such as a \u003ca href=\"https://omscs.gatech.edu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">$7,000 online master’s degree\u003c/a> in computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology (compared with the estimated nearly $43,000 for the two-year in-person version). That program has attracted thousands of students and a few copycats.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are also signs that prices could fall. Competition is intensifying from national nonprofit providers such as Western Governors University, which charges a comparatively low average of \u003ca href=\"https://www.wgu.edu/financial-aid-tuition.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">$8,300 per year\u003c/a>, and Southern New Hampshire University, whose undergraduate price per credit hour is a slightly lower-than-average (for online courses) \u003ca href=\"https://www.snhu.edu/tuition-and-financial-aid/online\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">$330\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also, universities have started cutting their ties with for-profit middlemen, called online program managers, which take big cuts of \u003ca href=\"https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED609143.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">up to 80%\u003c/a> of revenues. Nearly 150 such deals \u003ca href=\"https://www.validatedinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/OPM-Market-Insights-September-2024-v1.0.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">were canceled or ended and not renewed\u003c/a> in 2023, the most recent year for which the information is available, the market research firm Validated Insights reported.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another thing that could lower prices: As more online programs go live, they no longer require high up-front investment — just periodic updating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It is possible to save money on downstream costs if you offer the same course over a number of years,” said Justin Ortagus, director of the University of Florida’s Institute of Higher Education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While that survey of online officers found a \u003ca href=\"https://www.encoura.org/resources/wake-up-call/online-program-pricing-new-data-from-the-chloe-9-survey/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tiny decline\u003c/a> in the proportion of universities charging more for online than in-person classes, the drop was statistically insignificant, however. And as their enrollments are \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/the-impact-of-this-is-economic-decline/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">projected to plummet\u003c/a>, institutions increasingly need the revenue from online programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Emma Bittner, in Texas, ended up in a new online master’s program in public health from a private university that was cheaper than the others she’d found.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her day job is at the national nonprofit Young Invincibles, which pushes for reforms in higher education, health care and economic security for young Americans. And she still doesn’t understand the online pricing model.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m so confused about it. Even in the program I’m in now, you don’t get the same access to stuff as an in-person student,” she said. “What are you putting into it that costs so much?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about the \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/as-online-higher-education-hits-a-milestone-why-does-it-still-cost-so-much/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>cost of online higher education\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>The Hechinger Report\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>When Walmart \u003ca href=\"https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2023/09/28/all-learning-counts-at-walmart-5-ways-we-re-investing-in-more-opportunities-to-grow\">stopped requiring college degrees\u003c/a> for most of its corporate jobs last year, the company confronted three deep truths about work and schooling:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A college diploma is only a proxy for what someone knows, and not always a perfect one. A degree’s high cost sidelines many people. For industries dominated by workers without degrees, cultivating future talent demands a different playbook.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some of the nation’s largest employers, including Walmart and McDonald’s, are now broaching a new frontier in higher education: convincing colleges to give retail and fast-food workers credit for what they learn on the job, counting toward a degree.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Behind the scenes, executives often paint a grander transformation of hiring, a world where your resume will rely less on titles or diplomas and act more like a passport of skills you’ve proven you have.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For now, companies and educators are only starting to chip away at one of the first steps: figuring out how much college credit a work skill is worth.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Getting credit for Walmart training\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Something unusual happened to Bonnie Boop one semester.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She’d returned to college in her late 40s using Walmart’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/07/27/1021380394/walmart-offering-full-college-tuition-and-books-for-employees\">tuition-assistance program\u003c/a> after joining the company as a part-time stocker. In her younger years, she had gotten two associate degrees, so her children used to joke that she might as well say she’d gone to school for four years. But to her, it wasn’t the same.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Bachelor’s degrees tend to open more doors,” Boop says. Plus, she says, she persisted for “the principle of it all.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Walmart, Boop stocked health and beauty aisles in the evenings after another day job. Later, she went full time and got promoted to supervise others. This required new training at “Walmart Academy”: brief, intensive courses on leadership, financial decision-making and workforce planning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then one day, looking at Boop’s upcoming business-operations class at Southern New Hampshire University, which Boop attended online from Alabama, her adviser found the record showing she’d already taken the course.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But I didn’t,” Boop says. “And she said, ‘Yes, you got credit from Walmart Academy.’ And I said, what?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Through corporate training and certificates that convert to college credit, Walmart Academy aims to get workers as far as halfway to a college degree, the organization’s chief told NPR. Boop had done several such programs, which let her bypass two college courses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At her rate of study, “that would have been two semesters’ worth,” Boop says. “I was like, wow!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Studying while also holding down a job meant staying up late after her shift that ended at 11 p.m. and keeping a meticulous schedule of big school projects to do on her days off. After 2 1/2 years of this, expedited by her associate degrees, Boop watched her photo slide across the screen at the virtual graduation in December.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wearing her cap and gown, she posed for photos with her new diploma: Bachelor of Science in business administration, with a concentration in industrial organizational psychology. Today, Boop is her store’s “people lead” overseeing more than 200 workers.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>What’s in it for corporations?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Many American universities have long offered credit for corporate training by companies like Google, IBM or Microsoft. For work in retail and fast food, the process is nascent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McDonald’s is working with several community colleges to build a path for converting on-the-job skills, like safe food handling or customer service, into credit toward degrees in culinary arts, hospitality or insurance. Walmart has over a dozen short-form certificates and 25 training courses — in tech, leadership, digital operations — that translate to credit at partner universities. The car-service chain Jiffy Lube has its own college credit program, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For adults who feel like they weren’t college material, what we are able to do is say, ‘You are. And you’re doing college-level work already,’” says Amber Garrison Duncan, who runs the nonprofit Competency-Based Education Network that connects employers and higher-education institutions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Educators hope this brings more students into the fold — expanding access to education and allowing more people to achieve better-paying, more-secure careers with less debt and fewer years of juggling work and study.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For companies that offer tuition assistance to employees, the idea that work skills should count toward college credit makes financial sense: It means a student spends less time in school and doesn’t have to pay for classes that would teach them something they already know.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And paying for tuition can attract workers in a competitive labor market and keep them longer, slowing turnover, saving money on recruitment and training, and cultivating more loyalty to the employer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McDonald’s and Amazon executives say this is exactly their motivation, noting that many people use their jobs as stepping stones to elsewhere. Walmart’s executives differ, saying that their goal is to build a pipeline of talent from the front lines to open positions within the company.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The U.S. military paved the way, but it’s not the same\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Counting existing knowledge toward a degree is not a radical idea. Plenty of high school students get a head start on college with credit for AP, or “advanced placement,” classes. Many colleges also offer “credit for prior learning” that lets students skip foreign-language classes if they’re already fluent — or test out of courses through special exams or assessments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The U.S. military took the idea further in recent decades. It worked with the American Council on Education to build a comprehensive database of how its jobs and training programs translate to college credit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s no rule about what colleges and universities have to accept,” says ACE’s Derrick Anderson. “But they can look at the person’s military record … and they figure out how much credit they want to award.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This and other education support made the military “a powerful engine of socioeconomic mobility,” Anderson says. His group’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.acenet.edu/Programs-Services/Pages/Credit-Transcripts/Students.aspx\">database of recommended credit\u003c/a> now spans work experience beyond the military: government, nonprofits, apprenticeships.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What I see working with employers, higher education and workforce organizations is a growing understanding that work and learning have been two silos in the past and can’t be two silos in the future,” says Haley Glover, director of Aspen Institute’s UpSkill America initiative.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>What about skills simply gained by working?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>For now, most of the college credit for work experience focuses on “prior learning” that’s taught in a classroom — standardized, structured and measurable enough to fit rigid criteria — such as training or certification programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Figuring out how to map on-the-job skills gained otherwise is the big leap.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a complex thing,” Glover says. “It requires an employer to be very rigorous about how they’re codifying and assessing, and that’s a capacity that a lot of employers don’t have. It also requires institutions of learning to be very open and progressive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Historically, some colleges have allowed students to present a portfolio, diligently documenting learnings on and off the job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The McDonald’s pilot program is considering how this could work for restaurant employees. Some schools offer a separate course, for example, specifically for compiling a work-skills portfolio.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But expanding this system to the retail and food-service universe would require an army of academics willing to perform individual reviews. That’s a tremendous amount of time, and professors are often hesitant to commit — especially if it means they’d miss out on a potential student.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This definitely is a process that disrupts what traditional higher ed is used to, in terms of seat time — credit for sitting in a class and doing assignments,” says Brianne McDonough at the workforce development nonprofit Jobs for the Future. “It’s a big change.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then, there are more basic challenges. Many workers simply don’t know about their employers’ education offers or struggle to navigate the application bureaucracies. They often receive little scheduling leeway to balance their working and studying hours.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Shockingly tragic” was how Anderson described the small share of workers taking advantage of corporate college perks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s partly why hiring and education officials talk about a \u003ca href=\"https://hbr.org/2023/03/the-new-collar-workforce\">“skills-first approach” to higher education\u003c/a> — a future of short-form certificates and credentials weighed on par with college degrees.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is a problem that a lot of companies are trying to solve for,” says Lorraine Stomski, who heads Walmart’s learning and leadership programs. “What are the rules of the future?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>When Walmart \u003ca href=\"https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2023/09/28/all-learning-counts-at-walmart-5-ways-we-re-investing-in-more-opportunities-to-grow\">stopped requiring college degrees\u003c/a> for most of its corporate jobs last year, the company confronted three deep truths about work and schooling:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A college diploma is only a proxy for what someone knows, and not always a perfect one. A degree’s high cost sidelines many people. For industries dominated by workers without degrees, cultivating future talent demands a different playbook.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some of the nation’s largest employers, including Walmart and McDonald’s, are now broaching a new frontier in higher education: convincing colleges to give retail and fast-food workers credit for what they learn on the job, counting toward a degree.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Behind the scenes, executives often paint a grander transformation of hiring, a world where your resume will rely less on titles or diplomas and act more like a passport of skills you’ve proven you have.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For now, companies and educators are only starting to chip away at one of the first steps: figuring out how much college credit a work skill is worth.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Getting credit for Walmart training\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Something unusual happened to Bonnie Boop one semester.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She’d returned to college in her late 40s using Walmart’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/07/27/1021380394/walmart-offering-full-college-tuition-and-books-for-employees\">tuition-assistance program\u003c/a> after joining the company as a part-time stocker. In her younger years, she had gotten two associate degrees, so her children used to joke that she might as well say she’d gone to school for four years. But to her, it wasn’t the same.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Bachelor’s degrees tend to open more doors,” Boop says. Plus, she says, she persisted for “the principle of it all.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Walmart, Boop stocked health and beauty aisles in the evenings after another day job. Later, she went full time and got promoted to supervise others. This required new training at “Walmart Academy”: brief, intensive courses on leadership, financial decision-making and workforce planning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then one day, looking at Boop’s upcoming business-operations class at Southern New Hampshire University, which Boop attended online from Alabama, her adviser found the record showing she’d already taken the course.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But I didn’t,” Boop says. “And she said, ‘Yes, you got credit from Walmart Academy.’ And I said, what?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Through corporate training and certificates that convert to college credit, Walmart Academy aims to get workers as far as halfway to a college degree, the organization’s chief told NPR. Boop had done several such programs, which let her bypass two college courses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At her rate of study, “that would have been two semesters’ worth,” Boop says. “I was like, wow!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Studying while also holding down a job meant staying up late after her shift that ended at 11 p.m. and keeping a meticulous schedule of big school projects to do on her days off. After 2 1/2 years of this, expedited by her associate degrees, Boop watched her photo slide across the screen at the virtual graduation in December.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wearing her cap and gown, she posed for photos with her new diploma: Bachelor of Science in business administration, with a concentration in industrial organizational psychology. Today, Boop is her store’s “people lead” overseeing more than 200 workers.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>What’s in it for corporations?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Many American universities have long offered credit for corporate training by companies like Google, IBM or Microsoft. For work in retail and fast food, the process is nascent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McDonald’s is working with several community colleges to build a path for converting on-the-job skills, like safe food handling or customer service, into credit toward degrees in culinary arts, hospitality or insurance. Walmart has over a dozen short-form certificates and 25 training courses — in tech, leadership, digital operations — that translate to credit at partner universities. The car-service chain Jiffy Lube has its own college credit program, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For adults who feel like they weren’t college material, what we are able to do is say, ‘You are. And you’re doing college-level work already,’” says Amber Garrison Duncan, who runs the nonprofit Competency-Based Education Network that connects employers and higher-education institutions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Educators hope this brings more students into the fold — expanding access to education and allowing more people to achieve better-paying, more-secure careers with less debt and fewer years of juggling work and study.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For companies that offer tuition assistance to employees, the idea that work skills should count toward college credit makes financial sense: It means a student spends less time in school and doesn’t have to pay for classes that would teach them something they already know.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And paying for tuition can attract workers in a competitive labor market and keep them longer, slowing turnover, saving money on recruitment and training, and cultivating more loyalty to the employer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McDonald’s and Amazon executives say this is exactly their motivation, noting that many people use their jobs as stepping stones to elsewhere. Walmart’s executives differ, saying that their goal is to build a pipeline of talent from the front lines to open positions within the company.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The U.S. military paved the way, but it’s not the same\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Counting existing knowledge toward a degree is not a radical idea. Plenty of high school students get a head start on college with credit for AP, or “advanced placement,” classes. Many colleges also offer “credit for prior learning” that lets students skip foreign-language classes if they’re already fluent — or test out of courses through special exams or assessments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The U.S. military took the idea further in recent decades. It worked with the American Council on Education to build a comprehensive database of how its jobs and training programs translate to college credit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s no rule about what colleges and universities have to accept,” says ACE’s Derrick Anderson. “But they can look at the person’s military record … and they figure out how much credit they want to award.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This and other education support made the military “a powerful engine of socioeconomic mobility,” Anderson says. His group’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.acenet.edu/Programs-Services/Pages/Credit-Transcripts/Students.aspx\">database of recommended credit\u003c/a> now spans work experience beyond the military: government, nonprofits, apprenticeships.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What I see working with employers, higher education and workforce organizations is a growing understanding that work and learning have been two silos in the past and can’t be two silos in the future,” says Haley Glover, director of Aspen Institute’s UpSkill America initiative.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>What about skills simply gained by working?\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>For now, most of the college credit for work experience focuses on “prior learning” that’s taught in a classroom — standardized, structured and measurable enough to fit rigid criteria — such as training or certification programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Figuring out how to map on-the-job skills gained otherwise is the big leap.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a complex thing,” Glover says. “It requires an employer to be very rigorous about how they’re codifying and assessing, and that’s a capacity that a lot of employers don’t have. It also requires institutions of learning to be very open and progressive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Historically, some colleges have allowed students to present a portfolio, diligently documenting learnings on and off the job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The McDonald’s pilot program is considering how this could work for restaurant employees. Some schools offer a separate course, for example, specifically for compiling a work-skills portfolio.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But expanding this system to the retail and food-service universe would require an army of academics willing to perform individual reviews. That’s a tremendous amount of time, and professors are often hesitant to commit — especially if it means they’d miss out on a potential student.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This definitely is a process that disrupts what traditional higher ed is used to, in terms of seat time — credit for sitting in a class and doing assignments,” says Brianne McDonough at the workforce development nonprofit Jobs for the Future. “It’s a big change.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then, there are more basic challenges. Many workers simply don’t know about their employers’ education offers or struggle to navigate the application bureaucracies. They often receive little scheduling leeway to balance their working and studying hours.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Shockingly tragic” was how Anderson described the small share of workers taking advantage of corporate college perks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s partly why hiring and education officials talk about a \u003ca href=\"https://hbr.org/2023/03/the-new-collar-workforce\">“skills-first approach” to higher education\u003c/a> — a future of short-form certificates and credentials weighed on par with college degrees.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is a problem that a lot of companies are trying to solve for,” says Lorraine Stomski, who heads Walmart’s learning and leadership programs. “What are the rules of the future?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>This year’s college financial aid process was supposed to be easier, after the U.S. Department of Education revamped the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, last year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But problems with the FAFSA form began last fall:\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>The new form was \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/01/05/1222892834/fafsa-student-financial-aid-college\">released months behind schedule\u003c/a>, setting colleges scrambling to get financial aid packages out in time.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The released form included \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/01/09/1222664638/fafsa-student-financial-aid-college\">a mistake that would have cost students $1.8 billion\u003c/a> in federal student aid. The Education Department \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/01/23/1226406495/families-colleges-remain-limbo-education-department-promises-fix-fafsa-mistake\">said in January it would fix the issue\u003c/a> – but the fix only compounded the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/01/31/1228082594/fafsa-student-financial-aid-delay\">delays in sending student’s FAFSA data to schools\u003c/a>.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>And a \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/02/12/1230396481/yet-another-fafsa-problem-non-citizens-cant-fill-it-out\">technical issue with the form\u003c/a> meant many non-citizens, or children of non-citizens, could not fill it out.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Vanessa Cordova Ramirez is a U.S. citizen, but her mom is not. When they sat down to fill out the FAFSA earlier this year, the application didn’t go through. It’s a similar story for others with parents who do not have a Social Security number.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cordova Ramirez was in a financial aid limbo. She had gotten into all her top choice schools, but she couldn’t commit or put a deposit down anywhere without knowing how much financial aid she was getting from each school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If I don’t receive anything, what am I supposed to do?” she said. “How am I going to pay for everything? Am I going to go into the school that I want to? Am I going to pursue the career that I want to? Am I going to be something in life?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finally, after many attempts to submit the FAFSA, Cordova Ramirez got her form through in May.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Many students are still stuck\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>NPR spoke with families, counselors and advocates who shared similar problems as Cordova Ramirez. Among those impacted are permanent residents, green card holders and undocumented parents without a Social Security number.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eric Hoover is a senior writer for the \u003cem>Chronicle of Higher Education\u003c/em> and has been covering the FAFSA ordeal. He says there are still a lot of students experiencing issues with FAFSA, like low-income first generation students and, in many cases, students who are born in the U.S. but have one or more parents who are undocumented.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It also includes a huge swath of broadly defined middle-income students who have encountered problems with the FAFSA and who, in some cases, had to wait and wait and wait to get one aid offer or to get aid offers from all the colleges they were waiting to hear from so that they could sit down at the kitchen table with mom and dad and try to make an apples-to-apples comparison of their aid offers,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And for some students, Hoover says it’s not just a question of how much money they will get: “The FAFSA is a key that unlocks college for so many American families.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In many cases, without every last dollar that they will hope to receive, they’re not going to be able to attend perhaps the college they most wanted to attend but, in some cases, any college at all.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Universities are concerned\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Hoover says some colleges are nervous about their enrollment numbers dropping: “Particularly at the many relatively small colleges that do not have gigantic endowments, as well as regional public institutions throughout the country.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says he has been in touch with some college presidents and enrollment leaders who are keeping an eye on the bottom line.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In some cases, the downstream effect of that enrollment shortfall could be budget cuts that really hurt, could be pay or hiring freezes and perhaps, you know, the worst kind of cuts that any college could make, which is to cut jobs,” he says. “An empty seat is a lost revenue.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>FAFSA is the key to college for many students. Hoover says most colleges don’t have the resources to fill that missing federal aid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hoover says the college officials he’s spoken with want the lingering technical errors in the FAFSA to be fixed: “They want to hear that students who still can’t get through and complete the federal aid form are not being ignored and that if there need to be more workarounds that enable the FAFSA saga of 2024 to subside, it needs to happen now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For sponsor-free episodes of \u003cem>Consider This,\u003c/em> sign up for C\u003cem>onsider This+\u003c/em> via Apple Podcasts or at \u003ca href=\"http://plus.npr.org/\">plus.npr.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Email us at \u003ca href=\"mailto:considerthis@npr.org\">considerthis@npr.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The college application process was supposed to get easier. That’s because last year, the U.S. Department of Education announced changes to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>VANESSA CORDOVA RAMIREZ: Hi, Hello. My name is Vanessa Cordova Ramirez, and I’m a Mexican first-generation student, hopefully attending college in the fall.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: The new formulas used to calculate how much money students would get meant more federal money for low-income families and children of immigrants like Cordova Ramirez.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CORDOVA RAMIREZ: Well, I am interested in St. Joseph’s University and Manhattan College. Those are my top two. Maybe St. John’s – I’m thinking about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: Cordova Ramirez lives in Queens, N.Y., and wants to become a radiology technician. She works two jobs and helps out a lot around the house. She wants to stay in New York for school, to continue to help out her family and be close to her younger brother. So location is her top priority when choosing a college.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second is, of course, cost. But when Cordova Ramirez and her mom sat down to fill out the FAFSA earlier this year, their application didn’t go through – just like many others with parents who do not have a Social Security number.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JANET WOOJEONG LEE, BYLINE: Hi, Vanessa. Hi.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: NPR producer Janet Woojeong Lee went to visit Cordova Ramirez and her school counselor, Kristin Azer, at Williamsburg Preparatory High School, as they tried again to fill out the form earlier this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KRISTIN AZER: There’s a box to check below that says I do not have a Social Security, so for somebody undocumented, when you click it, it’ll gray out the box, and you hit through continue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: Cordova Ramirez comes from a mixed-status family. Even though she is a U.S. citizen, her mom is not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AZER: Gotten to the second step – creating a user name. We’ve made it to the third step. And now this is address – does make you feel like it’s possible. And then the error pops up – for more help creating your account call…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AUTOMATED VOICE: Start the application without an SSA ID. You can complete the entire application and submit it without signatures, or you can print a signature page and mail it in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LEE: So did we just get inaccurate information?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AZER: Correct. That is true for the old form. That is not correct for the brand-new application. What is the fix? Who do we demand them from when the people that we can call have no answers themselves?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANGEL PEREZ: Many students are holding off on enrolling at institutions because they need to know exactly how much they will owe in order to enroll.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: Angel Perez is the CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Cordova Ramirez was in that financial aid limbo. She had gotten into all her top choice schools, including St. Joseph’s, where the annual tuition is about $35,000. But she couldn’t commit or put a deposit down anywhere without knowing how much financial aid she’s getting from each school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CORDOVA RAMIREZ: If I don’t receive anything, what am I supposed to do? Like, how am I going to pay for everything? Like, am I going to go into the school that I want to? Am I going to pursue the career that I want to? Am I going to be something in life?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: After many attempts to submit the FAFSA, Cordova Ramirez did finally get her form through in May.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CORDOVA RAMIREZ: I finally received my financial aid package from St. Joseph’s, and with the FAFSA amount that they’re giving me and the scholarships from St. Joseph’s, it looks like I’m going to basically be going almost full ride, which is amazing ’cause obviously it’s more affordable for my family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: But there are still students stuck in financial aid limbo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: CONSIDER THIS – we’re just a couple of months away from colleges and universities kicking off a new academic year. Before 2024, students would already have known how much aid they’re getting. For many, not knowing could mean they can’t go to college.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: From NPR, I’m Sacha Pfeiffer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: It’s CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. The problems with the FAFSA form, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, began last fall. And with August and September just around the corner, some applicants continue to experience technical issues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ERIC HOOVER: It’s a whole lot of students. It includes low-income first-generation students in many cases. It includes students who are U.S.-born but have one or more parents who are undocumented.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: I spoke with Eric Hoover, a senior writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education who’s been covering the FAFSA ordeal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>HOOVER: It also includes a huge swath of broadly defined middle-income students who have encountered problems with the FAFSA and who, in some cases, had to wait and wait and wait to get one aid offer or to get eight offers from all the colleges they were waiting to hear from so that they could sit down at the kitchen table with mom and dad and try to make an apples to apples comparison of their eight offers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: For some students, is it not just a question of how much money they will get, but whether they’ll be able to go to college at all?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>HOOVER: Yes, absolutely. The FAFSA is a key that unlocks college for so many American families, and without the federal aid, in many cases without every last dollar that they will hope to receive, they’re not going to be able to attend perhaps the college they most wanted to attend, but in some cases, any college at all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: So this is obviously affecting students. I understand that some colleges are nervous about having possibly lower numbers of students for the next year, and maybe the dollars and the finances won’t work out the way they want. What’s the concern on the enrollment front?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>HOOVER: Yeah, great concern on the enrollment front, particularly at the many, many relatively small colleges that do not have gigantic endowments, as well as regional public institutions throughout the country. I’ve been in touch with some college presidents and enrollment leaders who tell me that they’re worried that when everything shakes out and the fall semester begins, that they are going to have 5- or 7- or 15% fewer first year students than they did last year. They’re concerned about that on a human level, but they’re also concerned about the impact of that shortfall on the bottom line. And in some cases, you know, the downstream effect of that enrollment shortfall could be budget cuts that really hurt, could be pay or hiring freezes and perhaps, you know, the worst kind of cuts that any college could make, which is to cut jobs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: Explain a little more why this affects college finances. How does the FAFSA aid fit into how colleges do their own financial planning?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>HOOVER: Right. So if the FAFSA is the key that is going to unlock college for a given student, and without that federal aid, they really don’t have the means to afford going to college X, well then, they can’t enroll, and that’s an empty seat on a college campus. Most colleges do not have the resources to fill the missing federal aid that so many students have right now with an incomplete FAFSA. So…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: So those empty seats are lost revenue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>HOOVER: And an empty seat is a lost revenue, an empty bed or an empty – you know, if – a quad that has fewer students in it is also a bottom line that looks less healthy than it might otherwise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: What are you hearing from the colleges and university officials you talk to about what they need to solve this problem?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>HOOVER: They want the glitches and technical errors that are continuing to foul them up – they want them fixed. They want to hear that students who still can’t get through and complete the federal aid form are not being ignored and that if there need to be more workarounds that enable the FAFSA saga of 2024 to subside, it needs to happen now. We’re a few weeks away from the Fourth of July. They just want these problems fixed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: That was Eric Hoover, a writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: This episode was produced by Alejandra Marquez Janse, Linnea Anderson and Brianna Scott. It was edited by Tinbete Ermyas and Courtney Dorning. Sequoia Carrillo and Janet Woojeong Lee contributed reporting. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: It’s CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I’m Sacha Pfeiffer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>This year’s college financial aid process was supposed to be easier, after the U.S. Department of Education revamped the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, last year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But problems with the FAFSA form began last fall:\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>The new form was \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/01/05/1222892834/fafsa-student-financial-aid-college\">released months behind schedule\u003c/a>, setting colleges scrambling to get financial aid packages out in time.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The released form included \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/01/09/1222664638/fafsa-student-financial-aid-college\">a mistake that would have cost students $1.8 billion\u003c/a> in federal student aid. The Education Department \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/01/23/1226406495/families-colleges-remain-limbo-education-department-promises-fix-fafsa-mistake\">said in January it would fix the issue\u003c/a> – but the fix only compounded the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/01/31/1228082594/fafsa-student-financial-aid-delay\">delays in sending student’s FAFSA data to schools\u003c/a>.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>And a \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/02/12/1230396481/yet-another-fafsa-problem-non-citizens-cant-fill-it-out\">technical issue with the form\u003c/a> meant many non-citizens, or children of non-citizens, could not fill it out.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Vanessa Cordova Ramirez is a U.S. citizen, but her mom is not. When they sat down to fill out the FAFSA earlier this year, the application didn’t go through. It’s a similar story for others with parents who do not have a Social Security number.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cordova Ramirez was in a financial aid limbo. She had gotten into all her top choice schools, but she couldn’t commit or put a deposit down anywhere without knowing how much financial aid she was getting from each school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If I don’t receive anything, what am I supposed to do?” she said. “How am I going to pay for everything? Am I going to go into the school that I want to? Am I going to pursue the career that I want to? Am I going to be something in life?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finally, after many attempts to submit the FAFSA, Cordova Ramirez got her form through in May.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Many students are still stuck\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>NPR spoke with families, counselors and advocates who shared similar problems as Cordova Ramirez. Among those impacted are permanent residents, green card holders and undocumented parents without a Social Security number.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eric Hoover is a senior writer for the \u003cem>Chronicle of Higher Education\u003c/em> and has been covering the FAFSA ordeal. He says there are still a lot of students experiencing issues with FAFSA, like low-income first generation students and, in many cases, students who are born in the U.S. but have one or more parents who are undocumented.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It also includes a huge swath of broadly defined middle-income students who have encountered problems with the FAFSA and who, in some cases, had to wait and wait and wait to get one aid offer or to get aid offers from all the colleges they were waiting to hear from so that they could sit down at the kitchen table with mom and dad and try to make an apples-to-apples comparison of their aid offers,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And for some students, Hoover says it’s not just a question of how much money they will get: “The FAFSA is a key that unlocks college for so many American families.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In many cases, without every last dollar that they will hope to receive, they’re not going to be able to attend perhaps the college they most wanted to attend but, in some cases, any college at all.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Universities are concerned\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Hoover says some colleges are nervous about their enrollment numbers dropping: “Particularly at the many relatively small colleges that do not have gigantic endowments, as well as regional public institutions throughout the country.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says he has been in touch with some college presidents and enrollment leaders who are keeping an eye on the bottom line.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In some cases, the downstream effect of that enrollment shortfall could be budget cuts that really hurt, could be pay or hiring freezes and perhaps, you know, the worst kind of cuts that any college could make, which is to cut jobs,” he says. “An empty seat is a lost revenue.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>FAFSA is the key to college for many students. Hoover says most colleges don’t have the resources to fill that missing federal aid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hoover says the college officials he’s spoken with want the lingering technical errors in the FAFSA to be fixed: “They want to hear that students who still can’t get through and complete the federal aid form are not being ignored and that if there need to be more workarounds that enable the FAFSA saga of 2024 to subside, it needs to happen now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For sponsor-free episodes of \u003cem>Consider This,\u003c/em> sign up for C\u003cem>onsider This+\u003c/em> via Apple Podcasts or at \u003ca href=\"http://plus.npr.org/\">plus.npr.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Email us at \u003ca href=\"mailto:considerthis@npr.org\">considerthis@npr.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"npr-transcript\">\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Transcript:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The college application process was supposed to get easier. That’s because last year, the U.S. Department of Education announced changes to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>VANESSA CORDOVA RAMIREZ: Hi, Hello. My name is Vanessa Cordova Ramirez, and I’m a Mexican first-generation student, hopefully attending college in the fall.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: The new formulas used to calculate how much money students would get meant more federal money for low-income families and children of immigrants like Cordova Ramirez.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CORDOVA RAMIREZ: Well, I am interested in St. Joseph’s University and Manhattan College. Those are my top two. Maybe St. John’s – I’m thinking about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: Cordova Ramirez lives in Queens, N.Y., and wants to become a radiology technician. She works two jobs and helps out a lot around the house. She wants to stay in New York for school, to continue to help out her family and be close to her younger brother. So location is her top priority when choosing a college.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second is, of course, cost. But when Cordova Ramirez and her mom sat down to fill out the FAFSA earlier this year, their application didn’t go through – just like many others with parents who do not have a Social Security number.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>JANET WOOJEONG LEE, BYLINE: Hi, Vanessa. Hi.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: NPR producer Janet Woojeong Lee went to visit Cordova Ramirez and her school counselor, Kristin Azer, at Williamsburg Preparatory High School, as they tried again to fill out the form earlier this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KRISTIN AZER: There’s a box to check below that says I do not have a Social Security, so for somebody undocumented, when you click it, it’ll gray out the box, and you hit through continue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: Cordova Ramirez comes from a mixed-status family. Even though she is a U.S. citizen, her mom is not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AZER: Gotten to the second step – creating a user name. We’ve made it to the third step. And now this is address – does make you feel like it’s possible. And then the error pops up – for more help creating your account call…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AUTOMATED VOICE: Start the application without an SSA ID. You can complete the entire application and submit it without signatures, or you can print a signature page and mail it in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>LEE: So did we just get inaccurate information?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AZER: Correct. That is true for the old form. That is not correct for the brand-new application. What is the fix? Who do we demand them from when the people that we can call have no answers themselves?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ANGEL PEREZ: Many students are holding off on enrolling at institutions because they need to know exactly how much they will owe in order to enroll.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: Angel Perez is the CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Cordova Ramirez was in that financial aid limbo. She had gotten into all her top choice schools, including St. Joseph’s, where the annual tuition is about $35,000. But she couldn’t commit or put a deposit down anywhere without knowing how much financial aid she’s getting from each school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CORDOVA RAMIREZ: If I don’t receive anything, what am I supposed to do? Like, how am I going to pay for everything? Like, am I going to go into the school that I want to? Am I going to pursue the career that I want to? Am I going to be something in life?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: After many attempts to submit the FAFSA, Cordova Ramirez did finally get her form through in May.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CORDOVA RAMIREZ: I finally received my financial aid package from St. Joseph’s, and with the FAFSA amount that they’re giving me and the scholarships from St. Joseph’s, it looks like I’m going to basically be going almost full ride, which is amazing ’cause obviously it’s more affordable for my family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: But there are still students stuck in financial aid limbo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: CONSIDER THIS – we’re just a couple of months away from colleges and universities kicking off a new academic year. Before 2024, students would already have known how much aid they’re getting. For many, not knowing could mean they can’t go to college.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: From NPR, I’m Sacha Pfeiffer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: It’s CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. The problems with the FAFSA form, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, began last fall. And with August and September just around the corner, some applicants continue to experience technical issues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ERIC HOOVER: It’s a whole lot of students. It includes low-income first-generation students in many cases. It includes students who are U.S.-born but have one or more parents who are undocumented.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: I spoke with Eric Hoover, a senior writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education who’s been covering the FAFSA ordeal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>HOOVER: It also includes a huge swath of broadly defined middle-income students who have encountered problems with the FAFSA and who, in some cases, had to wait and wait and wait to get one aid offer or to get eight offers from all the colleges they were waiting to hear from so that they could sit down at the kitchen table with mom and dad and try to make an apples to apples comparison of their eight offers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: For some students, is it not just a question of how much money they will get, but whether they’ll be able to go to college at all?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>HOOVER: Yes, absolutely. The FAFSA is a key that unlocks college for so many American families, and without the federal aid, in many cases without every last dollar that they will hope to receive, they’re not going to be able to attend perhaps the college they most wanted to attend, but in some cases, any college at all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: So this is obviously affecting students. I understand that some colleges are nervous about having possibly lower numbers of students for the next year, and maybe the dollars and the finances won’t work out the way they want. What’s the concern on the enrollment front?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>HOOVER: Yeah, great concern on the enrollment front, particularly at the many, many relatively small colleges that do not have gigantic endowments, as well as regional public institutions throughout the country. I’ve been in touch with some college presidents and enrollment leaders who tell me that they’re worried that when everything shakes out and the fall semester begins, that they are going to have 5- or 7- or 15% fewer first year students than they did last year. They’re concerned about that on a human level, but they’re also concerned about the impact of that shortfall on the bottom line. And in some cases, you know, the downstream effect of that enrollment shortfall could be budget cuts that really hurt, could be pay or hiring freezes and perhaps, you know, the worst kind of cuts that any college could make, which is to cut jobs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: Explain a little more why this affects college finances. How does the FAFSA aid fit into how colleges do their own financial planning?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>HOOVER: Right. So if the FAFSA is the key that is going to unlock college for a given student, and without that federal aid, they really don’t have the means to afford going to college X, well then, they can’t enroll, and that’s an empty seat on a college campus. Most colleges do not have the resources to fill the missing federal aid that so many students have right now with an incomplete FAFSA. So…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: So those empty seats are lost revenue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>HOOVER: And an empty seat is a lost revenue, an empty bed or an empty – you know, if – a quad that has fewer students in it is also a bottom line that looks less healthy than it might otherwise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: What are you hearing from the colleges and university officials you talk to about what they need to solve this problem?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>HOOVER: They want the glitches and technical errors that are continuing to foul them up – they want them fixed. They want to hear that students who still can’t get through and complete the federal aid form are not being ignored and that if there need to be more workarounds that enable the FAFSA saga of 2024 to subside, it needs to happen now. We’re a few weeks away from the Fourth of July. They just want these problems fixed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: That was Eric Hoover, a writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: This episode was produced by Alejandra Marquez Janse, Linnea Anderson and Brianna Scott. It was edited by Tinbete Ermyas and Courtney Dorning. Sequoia Carrillo and Janet Woojeong Lee contributed reporting. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PFEIFFER: It’s CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I’m Sacha Pfeiffer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/03/18/better-fafsa-fix-for-students-with-undocumented-parents-social-security/\" rel=\"canonical\">originally published\u003c/a> by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at \u003ca href=\"https://ckbe.at/newsletters\">ckbe.at/newsletters\u003c/a>\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many students breathed a sigh of relief last week when federal education officials \u003ca href=\"https://fsapartners.ed.gov/knowledge-center/library/electronic-announcements/2024-03-12/update-technical-fix-2024-25-fafsa-form-individuals-without-social-security-number-ssn\">announced critical fixes\u003c/a> to the federal application for financial aid that allows parents without Social Security numbers to contribute information to the form.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The change means tens of thousands of U.S. citizen students and others who are eligible for federal financial aid can finally complete their FAFSAs. But it also leaves families and college counselors scrambling to get through the process months after other students. And some families are still encountering problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It can be very discouraging for students and families who feel like they’re doing all the right things and yet are still coming up against barriers,” said Amanda Seider, who oversees the Massachusetts branch of the college access group OneGoal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/01/25/better-fafsa-challenges-for-students-and-parents-social-security-number/\">Chalkbeat reported\u003c/a> in January that a technical glitch had blocked students with undocumented parents from completing their financial aid applications for over two months. That left many educators and college access groups worried that students who already face higher barriers to college would be deterred by the delays — piled on top of an already difficult rollout of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/colorado/2024/01/09/colorado-counselor-advice-on-filling-out-better-fafsa/\">new, supposedly easier FAFSA\u003c/a>. Some colleges and scholarships award aid on a first-come, first-served basis, so students who apply later are at a disadvantage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During that time, students were left to navigate a confusing array of options, including whether they should just sit tight and wait for a fix, or try a partial workaround that could \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/02/13/paper-fafsa-college-financial-aid-undocumented-parents/\">put them at a higher risk of making a mistake\u003c/a> on their application or would require them to \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/02/21/better-fafsa-social-security-number-glitch-fix-announced/\">come back and fill out more paperwork later\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And there are still outstanding issues. As federal officials put the new fix in place, they \u003ca href=\"https://fsapartners.ed.gov/knowledge-center/library/electronic-announcements/2024-03-12/update-technical-fix-2024-25-fafsa-form-individuals-without-social-security-number-ssn\">uncovered two more issues\u003c/a> affecting the same group of students that still need to be resolved.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That means parents without Social Security numbers will have to enter their financial information manually, instead of having it pulled directly from the IRS. And in some cases — when a parent enters a name or address that doesn’t exactly match what their child put down, for example — parents are still getting error messages that block them from filling out the form. Federal officials said last week they would work to fix the issue “in the coming days.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Federal officials estimated that around 2% of financial aid applicants were affected by the original Social Security number glitch, which would equate to hundreds of thousands of students in a typical year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The issue caught the attention of dozens of Democratic House members, who \u003ca href=\"https://huffman.house.gov/imo/media/doc/FAFSA%20SSN%20Letter_Huffman_Garcia_Allred_Barragan.pdf\">sent a letter\u003c/a> to U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona urging the department to fix the problem quickly. \u003ca href=\"https://chuygarcia.house.gov/media/press-releases/garcia-huffman-allred-and-barragan-applaud-permanent-fix-to-federal-student-aid-form-following-letter-they-led\">In a press release issued last week\u003c/a>, U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman of California said the glitch was a “completely unacceptable error” that had caused “fear, stress, and missed opportunities for many kids across my district and the country.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I hope to see the Department take the steps necessary to ensure issues like this never arise again,” Huffman said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The rollout of the new FAFSA has been riddled with \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/colorado/2024/01/31/colorado-families-students-experience-more-fafsa-delays/\">problems and delays\u003c/a>. Education department officials have blamed \u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/03/11/how-new-fafsa-problems-began/\">insufficient funding and significant technical challenges\u003c/a> in updating old systems. Republicans have \u003ca href=\"https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/student-aid-policy/2024/03/04/how-ambitious-plans-new-fafsa-ended-fiasco\">accused the administration of being distracted by dealing with student loan forgiveness\u003c/a>. Outside observers have said \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/13/us/politics/fafsa-college-admissions.html\">all these factors and more played a role\u003c/a>, according to news reports.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>FAFSA applications are down 33% compared with this time last year, according to federal data \u003ca href=\"https://www.ncan.org/page/FAFSAtracker\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tracked by the National College Attainment Network\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the meantime, many colleges have \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/colorado/2024/02/29/colleges-and-universities-in-colorado-push-enrollment-other-deadlines/\">pushed back deadlines\u003c/a> as they wait for student financial information that will help them assemble aid packages. And families are waiting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, college counselors and advisers say they’re working to make sure students know what to do if they \u003ca href=\"https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-fafsa-fix-for-mixed-status-families-is-a-work-in-progress\">continue to encounter glitches\u003c/a>. They’re also trying to keep students’ spirits up and getting them ready to compare their financial aid and acceptance packages when they come in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The most important thing we can do is to share information about how to go about entering information manually, how to make sure that as they are completing those steps that it requires a lot of precision,” Seider said. “We really want to make sure that students and families are being proactive, and not experiencing this as their shortcoming, but rather saying ‘Hey, this system has been a little confusing, we need some help with it.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at \u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"mailto:kbelsha@chalkbeat.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003ci>kbelsha@chalkbeat.org\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/03/18/better-fafsa-fix-for-students-with-undocumented-parents-social-security/\" rel=\"canonical\">educational change\u003c/a> in public schools.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/03/18/better-fafsa-fix-for-students-with-undocumented-parents-social-security/\" rel=\"canonical\">originally published\u003c/a> by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at \u003ca href=\"https://ckbe.at/newsletters\">ckbe.at/newsletters\u003c/a>\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many students breathed a sigh of relief last week when federal education officials \u003ca href=\"https://fsapartners.ed.gov/knowledge-center/library/electronic-announcements/2024-03-12/update-technical-fix-2024-25-fafsa-form-individuals-without-social-security-number-ssn\">announced critical fixes\u003c/a> to the federal application for financial aid that allows parents without Social Security numbers to contribute information to the form.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The change means tens of thousands of U.S. citizen students and others who are eligible for federal financial aid can finally complete their FAFSAs. But it also leaves families and college counselors scrambling to get through the process months after other students. And some families are still encountering problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It can be very discouraging for students and families who feel like they’re doing all the right things and yet are still coming up against barriers,” said Amanda Seider, who oversees the Massachusetts branch of the college access group OneGoal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/01/25/better-fafsa-challenges-for-students-and-parents-social-security-number/\">Chalkbeat reported\u003c/a> in January that a technical glitch had blocked students with undocumented parents from completing their financial aid applications for over two months. That left many educators and college access groups worried that students who already face higher barriers to college would be deterred by the delays — piled on top of an already difficult rollout of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/colorado/2024/01/09/colorado-counselor-advice-on-filling-out-better-fafsa/\">new, supposedly easier FAFSA\u003c/a>. Some colleges and scholarships award aid on a first-come, first-served basis, so students who apply later are at a disadvantage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During that time, students were left to navigate a confusing array of options, including whether they should just sit tight and wait for a fix, or try a partial workaround that could \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/02/13/paper-fafsa-college-financial-aid-undocumented-parents/\">put them at a higher risk of making a mistake\u003c/a> on their application or would require them to \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/02/21/better-fafsa-social-security-number-glitch-fix-announced/\">come back and fill out more paperwork later\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And there are still outstanding issues. As federal officials put the new fix in place, they \u003ca href=\"https://fsapartners.ed.gov/knowledge-center/library/electronic-announcements/2024-03-12/update-technical-fix-2024-25-fafsa-form-individuals-without-social-security-number-ssn\">uncovered two more issues\u003c/a> affecting the same group of students that still need to be resolved.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That means parents without Social Security numbers will have to enter their financial information manually, instead of having it pulled directly from the IRS. And in some cases — when a parent enters a name or address that doesn’t exactly match what their child put down, for example — parents are still getting error messages that block them from filling out the form. Federal officials said last week they would work to fix the issue “in the coming days.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Federal officials estimated that around 2% of financial aid applicants were affected by the original Social Security number glitch, which would equate to hundreds of thousands of students in a typical year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The issue caught the attention of dozens of Democratic House members, who \u003ca href=\"https://huffman.house.gov/imo/media/doc/FAFSA%20SSN%20Letter_Huffman_Garcia_Allred_Barragan.pdf\">sent a letter\u003c/a> to U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona urging the department to fix the problem quickly. \u003ca href=\"https://chuygarcia.house.gov/media/press-releases/garcia-huffman-allred-and-barragan-applaud-permanent-fix-to-federal-student-aid-form-following-letter-they-led\">In a press release issued last week\u003c/a>, U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman of California said the glitch was a “completely unacceptable error” that had caused “fear, stress, and missed opportunities for many kids across my district and the country.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I hope to see the Department take the steps necessary to ensure issues like this never arise again,” Huffman said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The rollout of the new FAFSA has been riddled with \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/colorado/2024/01/31/colorado-families-students-experience-more-fafsa-delays/\">problems and delays\u003c/a>. Education department officials have blamed \u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/03/11/how-new-fafsa-problems-began/\">insufficient funding and significant technical challenges\u003c/a> in updating old systems. Republicans have \u003ca href=\"https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/student-aid-policy/2024/03/04/how-ambitious-plans-new-fafsa-ended-fiasco\">accused the administration of being distracted by dealing with student loan forgiveness\u003c/a>. Outside observers have said \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/13/us/politics/fafsa-college-admissions.html\">all these factors and more played a role\u003c/a>, according to news reports.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>FAFSA applications are down 33% compared with this time last year, according to federal data \u003ca href=\"https://www.ncan.org/page/FAFSAtracker\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tracked by the National College Attainment Network\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the meantime, many colleges have \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/colorado/2024/02/29/colleges-and-universities-in-colorado-push-enrollment-other-deadlines/\">pushed back deadlines\u003c/a> as they wait for student financial information that will help them assemble aid packages. And families are waiting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, college counselors and advisers say they’re working to make sure students know what to do if they \u003ca href=\"https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-fafsa-fix-for-mixed-status-families-is-a-work-in-progress\">continue to encounter glitches\u003c/a>. They’re also trying to keep students’ spirits up and getting them ready to compare their financial aid and acceptance packages when they come in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The most important thing we can do is to share information about how to go about entering information manually, how to make sure that as they are completing those steps that it requires a lot of precision,” Seider said. “We really want to make sure that students and families are being proactive, and not experiencing this as their shortcoming, but rather saying ‘Hey, this system has been a little confusing, we need some help with it.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at \u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"mailto:kbelsha@chalkbeat.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003ci>kbelsha@chalkbeat.org\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering \u003ca href=\"https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/03/18/better-fafsa-fix-for-students-with-undocumented-parents-social-security/\" rel=\"canonical\">educational change\u003c/a> in public schools.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">On a Tuesday evening in 2019, about 80 parents and students gathered in Archer High School in Lawrenceville, Georgia\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They were there for a night of post-secondary education planning. They reviewed statistics, heard school counselor recommendations and spoke with college representatives. It’s a common enough scene. Many high schools host college and career nights to help students and parents plan for the future, but this one had a twist: it was designed specifically for students with disabilities and their families.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Once students, especially students of color, are labeled with a disability, they “are more likely to be in the most restrictive environments,” which often limits that student’s access to the general education curriculum, said Erin Kilpatrick, the high school counselor who organized the event. “To be successful and have a chance to go to college…[students] need access to general education classes and honors classes.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s why Kilpatrick organized the post-secondary planning night, which included presentations from representatives of disability support offices at three colleges. She has seen throughout her career that low expectations at the high school level often mean that students with disabilities and their families are unprepared for post-secondary education opportunities. She has, for example, received calls from parents asking about their student’s options for a college education after they’ve already graduated and left the school. In Kilpatrick’s observation, only a fraction of students with disabilities pursue post-secondary education or are working within a few years of graduation. For the 2019 post-secondary planning night, her team predicted an attendance of 15 to 20, but ended up hosting four times that amount. The event was tailored to parents of students with Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) and 504 plans, both of which lay out specific environmental and academic accommodations for a student with a diagnosed disability.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">According to Kilpatrick, a partnership between educators and parents of students with disabilities gives parents the knowledge and social capital to be the best advocates for their children. Such partnerships also allow school counselors and special education teachers to tailor the post-secondary options to the child based on the child’s strengths, abilities and interests.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One of Kilpatrick’s concerns is when a student with disabilities becomes \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/students-finishing-high-school-degrees-dont-help-go-college/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">siloed onto an IEP diploma track\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Unlike a general education high school diploma, which students with an IEP are eligible to obtain, an IEP diploma does not fulfill requirements to join the military or get accepted into a two- or four-year colleges and universities. Parents may not know this and often rely on the expertise of school systems, which may not always push students with disabilities towards a general education diploma, said Kilpatrick. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">High school exit exams can be another barrier to students with disabilities obtaining a general education diploma. \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/more-states-could-drop-their-high-school-exit-exams/2023/11#:~:text=In%20January%2C%20the%20National%20Center,and%20Wyoming%E2%80%94still%20require%20the\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Nine states require a passing score on the high school exit exam\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> to receive a high school diploma, according to Education Week. During research for her dissertation, Kilpatrick met a parent whose twins had a specific learning disability and took the high school exit exam a combined total of 25 times. The hours dedicated to the exit exam came out as the equivalent to several days of high school life and could’ve been devoted to learning skills, such as job interview practice, said Kilpatrick. Georgia, where Kilpatrick works, \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.gadoe.org/Curriculum-Instruction-and-Assessment/Assessment/Pages/GHSGT.aspx#:~:text=This%20law%20became%20effective%20upon,GHSGT%20is%20no%20longer%20administered.\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">suspended the high school exit exam in 2015\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Leslie Lipson, a lawyer with 21 years of experience in legal educational and disability advocacy, said that the biggest systemic barrier that people with disabilities face is that they “are devalued as a whole in our culture.” The K-12 education system is a reflection of cultural and social experience at large, she added. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kilpatrick recommended that parents and students explore all of the options available to them regarding post-secondary education, starting in ninth grade. This includes the different academic tracks and career clusters available, as well as advocating for check-ins about those academic goals at every annual IEP meeting. Kilpatrick also encouraged families to inquire with testing providers about accommodations for the SAT, ACT and AP exams. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It is also important that students and parents know that they can advocate for or request honors, advanced placement, gifted and dual enrollment classes, said Kilpatrick. She also said that parents and students must remain mindful about the changes to legal protections when a student transitions from a K-12 education to post-secondary education options. Specifically, the change from \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://sites.ed.gov/idea/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">IDEA protections\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, which ensure k-12 students have free access to diagnostic and special education services, to \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.ada.gov/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ADA\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> or \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://archive.ada.gov/nprm_adaaa/adaaa-nprm-qa.htm#:~:text=Under%20the%20ADAAA%2C%20the%20focus,severity%20of%20the%20person's%20impairment.\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ADAAA\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> protections, which ensure equal rights and protections for students with disabilities on college campuses and beyond.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">From her dissertation research, Kilpatrick cited a solid support system as a factor in success after high school for students with disabilities. Many caregivers she talked to found knowledge-sharing between families helpful. Those networks may be found through school connections or other avenues, such as \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.p2pusa.org/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Parent to Parent\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, an organization that offers resources to parents and families of children with disabilities. Parents spend emotional labor, often invisible to schools and educators, said Kilpatrick, and they requested that educators have more empathy towards students with disabilities. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">According to Kilpatrick, school systems have to re-envision the possibilities for special education and students with disabilities. This can be done by providing training for educators and instilling a willingness to learn from families of students with disabilities. By holding high expectations for students with disabilities, educators reinforce the idea that these students and families “deserve to be supported,” and “deserve to have great life outcomes,” said Kilpatrick. “Disabilities are not homogeneous.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">On a Tuesday evening in 2019, about 80 parents and students gathered in Archer High School in Lawrenceville, Georgia\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They were there for a night of post-secondary education planning. They reviewed statistics, heard school counselor recommendations and spoke with college representatives. It’s a common enough scene. Many high schools host college and career nights to help students and parents plan for the future, but this one had a twist: it was designed specifically for students with disabilities and their families.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Once students, especially students of color, are labeled with a disability, they “are more likely to be in the most restrictive environments,” which often limits that student’s access to the general education curriculum, said Erin Kilpatrick, the high school counselor who organized the event. “To be successful and have a chance to go to college…[students] need access to general education classes and honors classes.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s why Kilpatrick organized the post-secondary planning night, which included presentations from representatives of disability support offices at three colleges. She has seen throughout her career that low expectations at the high school level often mean that students with disabilities and their families are unprepared for post-secondary education opportunities. She has, for example, received calls from parents asking about their student’s options for a college education after they’ve already graduated and left the school. In Kilpatrick’s observation, only a fraction of students with disabilities pursue post-secondary education or are working within a few years of graduation. For the 2019 post-secondary planning night, her team predicted an attendance of 15 to 20, but ended up hosting four times that amount. The event was tailored to parents of students with Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) and 504 plans, both of which lay out specific environmental and academic accommodations for a student with a diagnosed disability.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">According to Kilpatrick, a partnership between educators and parents of students with disabilities gives parents the knowledge and social capital to be the best advocates for their children. Such partnerships also allow school counselors and special education teachers to tailor the post-secondary options to the child based on the child’s strengths, abilities and interests.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One of Kilpatrick’s concerns is when a student with disabilities becomes \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/students-finishing-high-school-degrees-dont-help-go-college/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">siloed onto an IEP diploma track\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Unlike a general education high school diploma, which students with an IEP are eligible to obtain, an IEP diploma does not fulfill requirements to join the military or get accepted into a two- or four-year colleges and universities. Parents may not know this and often rely on the expertise of school systems, which may not always push students with disabilities towards a general education diploma, said Kilpatrick. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">High school exit exams can be another barrier to students with disabilities obtaining a general education diploma. \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/more-states-could-drop-their-high-school-exit-exams/2023/11#:~:text=In%20January%2C%20the%20National%20Center,and%20Wyoming%E2%80%94still%20require%20the\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Nine states require a passing score on the high school exit exam\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> to receive a high school diploma, according to Education Week. During research for her dissertation, Kilpatrick met a parent whose twins had a specific learning disability and took the high school exit exam a combined total of 25 times. The hours dedicated to the exit exam came out as the equivalent to several days of high school life and could’ve been devoted to learning skills, such as job interview practice, said Kilpatrick. Georgia, where Kilpatrick works, \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.gadoe.org/Curriculum-Instruction-and-Assessment/Assessment/Pages/GHSGT.aspx#:~:text=This%20law%20became%20effective%20upon,GHSGT%20is%20no%20longer%20administered.\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">suspended the high school exit exam in 2015\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Leslie Lipson, a lawyer with 21 years of experience in legal educational and disability advocacy, said that the biggest systemic barrier that people with disabilities face is that they “are devalued as a whole in our culture.” The K-12 education system is a reflection of cultural and social experience at large, she added. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kilpatrick recommended that parents and students explore all of the options available to them regarding post-secondary education, starting in ninth grade. This includes the different academic tracks and career clusters available, as well as advocating for check-ins about those academic goals at every annual IEP meeting. Kilpatrick also encouraged families to inquire with testing providers about accommodations for the SAT, ACT and AP exams. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It is also important that students and parents know that they can advocate for or request honors, advanced placement, gifted and dual enrollment classes, said Kilpatrick. She also said that parents and students must remain mindful about the changes to legal protections when a student transitions from a K-12 education to post-secondary education options. Specifically, the change from \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://sites.ed.gov/idea/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">IDEA protections\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, which ensure k-12 students have free access to diagnostic and special education services, to \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.ada.gov/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ADA\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> or \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://archive.ada.gov/nprm_adaaa/adaaa-nprm-qa.htm#:~:text=Under%20the%20ADAAA%2C%20the%20focus,severity%20of%20the%20person's%20impairment.\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ADAAA\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> protections, which ensure equal rights and protections for students with disabilities on college campuses and beyond.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">From her dissertation research, Kilpatrick cited a solid support system as a factor in success after high school for students with disabilities. Many caregivers she talked to found knowledge-sharing between families helpful. Those networks may be found through school connections or other avenues, such as \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.p2pusa.org/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Parent to Parent\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, an organization that offers resources to parents and families of children with disabilities. Parents spend emotional labor, often invisible to schools and educators, said Kilpatrick, and they requested that educators have more empathy towards students with disabilities. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">According to Kilpatrick, school systems have to re-envision the possibilities for special education and students with disabilities. This can be done by providing training for educators and instilling a willingness to learn from families of students with disabilities. By holding high expectations for students with disabilities, educators reinforce the idea that these students and families “deserve to be supported,” and “deserve to have great life outcomes,” said Kilpatrick. “Disabilities are not homogeneous.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Yet another FAFSA problem: Many noncitizens can't fill it out",
"headTitle": "Yet another FAFSA problem: Many noncitizens can’t fill it out | KQED",
"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"storyMajorUpdateDate\">\u003cstrong>Updated February 13, 2024 at 6:00 AM ET\u003c/strong>\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>Most days, Vanessa Cordova Ramirez wakes at 6 a.m. to take care of her little brother, walk the puppy, make breakfast, and tidy up her family’s Queens apartment before heading to school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She’s a planner. Otherwise, the 17-year-old says, she couldn’t manage schoolwork, extracurriculars, two jobs, and family responsibilities. “Life is a little hectic,” she admits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cordova Ramirez is in her final semester at Williamsburg Preparatory High School, and already has acceptances from all five of her top college choices. Location – a college near her family in New York City – was top priority, she says. But next on the list? Affordability. In order to make this dream come true she needs federal financial aid and scholarships.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a moment she’s been planning for years. But last month, when Cordova Ramirez and her mom sat down with a counselor to fill out the FAFSA, the form that will determine how much assistance she’ll receive, all they got was an error message.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>“They don’t have any solutions for us”\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Her family is not alone. This rejection has been a common error for students with parents who don’t have a Social Security number, says Kristin Azer, a college counselor at Williamsburg Prep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In reporting this story, NPR spoke with families, counselors and advocates who shared similar problems. Among those impacted are permanent residents, green card holders or undocumented parents without a Social Security number.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since the form opened in January, Azer, Cordova Ramirez and her mom have tried to complete the online application more than 20 times. Each time, they get the same error message, directing them to a phone number for any questions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve called the number. They don’t have any solutions for us,” says Azer. When they call, they get an automated message that provides old and outdated information. When she’s lucky enough to get a live person on the line, often after waiting on hold for hours, they tell her to try filling out the form again later.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Do you understand how frustrating that is?” she says. “You act like we have all the time in the world to just sit down and be like ‘Ah, time to apply for the FAFSA right now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Following NPR’s reporting, the U.S. Education Department said it was aware of the problem and that staff were meeting daily to resolve it. They recommended that students with parents who aren’t citizens should wait to fill out the form online, but were unable to provide any timeline for the fix.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s the latest in a series of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63075/a-new-fafsa-setback-means-many-college-financial-aid-offers-wont-come-until-april\">problems with the FAFSA this year\u003c/a>. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/62959/the-fafsa-rollout-has-been-rough-on-students-the-biggest-problem-is-yet-to-come\">The form rolled out months late\u003c/a>, setting colleges scrambling to get financial aid packages out in time. Even with the extra time to get it correct, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63005/exclusive-the-education-department-says-it-will-fix-its-1-8-billion-fafsa-mistake\">NPR reported recently on a technicality\u003c/a> the department overlooked – potentially costing students almost $2 billion.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Concerns about bad advice\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>The implications of this latest problem are huge, preventing families from getting essential access to money for college, or even making informed enrollment decisions about how much a college education will cost them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the meantime, there have been troubling reports of potentially risky workarounds – like asking students to take photos of their parents’ passports and email them to the Ed Department.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“First of all, that assumes [the parents] have one,” says Bill Short, who runs a scholarship program for first-generation students at Saint Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. Beyond that, he adds, it raises serious concerns about online privacy:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Emailing a sensitive document like that is about as insecure as it gets. You might as well make [the required paperwork] into a paper airplane and toss it out the window.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>The long wait continues\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>The Education Department did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the timetable for a fix, or about the reports of families being told to send photos of their passports through email.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In past years, the general guidance with FAFSA has been for students to complete it as soon as possible. Amid the current delays, some universities have pushed back enrollment deadlines from the usual May 1 to June 1, while others have made their deposits refundable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, the frustrations are mounting for students and their families as they watch “everybody else get a head start on you,” says Short.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You’re still standing in the starting line waiting for someone to say, ‘OK, now you can go,’ ” he adds. “Your perception is: ‘By the time I finally get there, they’re going to cross the finish line, and the money’s going to be gone.’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cordova Ramirez feels that frustration deeply.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I have done everything,” she says. “I’ve taken the extracurriculars. I’ve tried to make a good application for myself for colleges to be like, ‘Yes, that’s someone we want.'”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every day, she asks herself the same questions, over and over: “Am I going [to college] now? Am I going to the school that I want? Am I going to pursue the career that I want? Am I going to be something in life?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Audio produced by: Janet Woojeong Lee and Mallory Yu\u003cbr>\nEdited by: Steve Drummond\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Yet+another+FAFSA+problem%3A+Many+noncitizens+can%27t+fill+it+out&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cdiv class=\"storyMajorUpdateDate\">\u003cstrong>Updated February 13, 2024 at 6:00 AM ET\u003c/strong>\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>Most days, Vanessa Cordova Ramirez wakes at 6 a.m. to take care of her little brother, walk the puppy, make breakfast, and tidy up her family’s Queens apartment before heading to school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She’s a planner. Otherwise, the 17-year-old says, she couldn’t manage schoolwork, extracurriculars, two jobs, and family responsibilities. “Life is a little hectic,” she admits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cordova Ramirez is in her final semester at Williamsburg Preparatory High School, and already has acceptances from all five of her top college choices. Location – a college near her family in New York City – was top priority, she says. But next on the list? Affordability. In order to make this dream come true she needs federal financial aid and scholarships.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a moment she’s been planning for years. But last month, when Cordova Ramirez and her mom sat down with a counselor to fill out the FAFSA, the form that will determine how much assistance she’ll receive, all they got was an error message.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>“They don’t have any solutions for us”\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Her family is not alone. This rejection has been a common error for students with parents who don’t have a Social Security number, says Kristin Azer, a college counselor at Williamsburg Prep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In reporting this story, NPR spoke with families, counselors and advocates who shared similar problems. Among those impacted are permanent residents, green card holders or undocumented parents without a Social Security number.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since the form opened in January, Azer, Cordova Ramirez and her mom have tried to complete the online application more than 20 times. Each time, they get the same error message, directing them to a phone number for any questions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve called the number. They don’t have any solutions for us,” says Azer. When they call, they get an automated message that provides old and outdated information. When she’s lucky enough to get a live person on the line, often after waiting on hold for hours, they tell her to try filling out the form again later.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Do you understand how frustrating that is?” she says. “You act like we have all the time in the world to just sit down and be like ‘Ah, time to apply for the FAFSA right now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Following NPR’s reporting, the U.S. Education Department said it was aware of the problem and that staff were meeting daily to resolve it. They recommended that students with parents who aren’t citizens should wait to fill out the form online, but were unable to provide any timeline for the fix.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s the latest in a series of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63075/a-new-fafsa-setback-means-many-college-financial-aid-offers-wont-come-until-april\">problems with the FAFSA this year\u003c/a>. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/62959/the-fafsa-rollout-has-been-rough-on-students-the-biggest-problem-is-yet-to-come\">The form rolled out months late\u003c/a>, setting colleges scrambling to get financial aid packages out in time. Even with the extra time to get it correct, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63005/exclusive-the-education-department-says-it-will-fix-its-1-8-billion-fafsa-mistake\">NPR reported recently on a technicality\u003c/a> the department overlooked – potentially costing students almost $2 billion.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Concerns about bad advice\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>The implications of this latest problem are huge, preventing families from getting essential access to money for college, or even making informed enrollment decisions about how much a college education will cost them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the meantime, there have been troubling reports of potentially risky workarounds – like asking students to take photos of their parents’ passports and email them to the Ed Department.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“First of all, that assumes [the parents] have one,” says Bill Short, who runs a scholarship program for first-generation students at Saint Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. Beyond that, he adds, it raises serious concerns about online privacy:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Emailing a sensitive document like that is about as insecure as it gets. You might as well make [the required paperwork] into a paper airplane and toss it out the window.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>The long wait continues\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>The Education Department did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the timetable for a fix, or about the reports of families being told to send photos of their passports through email.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In past years, the general guidance with FAFSA has been for students to complete it as soon as possible. Amid the current delays, some universities have pushed back enrollment deadlines from the usual May 1 to June 1, while others have made their deposits refundable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, the frustrations are mounting for students and their families as they watch “everybody else get a head start on you,” says Short.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You’re still standing in the starting line waiting for someone to say, ‘OK, now you can go,’ ” he adds. “Your perception is: ‘By the time I finally get there, they’re going to cross the finish line, and the money’s going to be gone.’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cordova Ramirez feels that frustration deeply.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I have done everything,” she says. “I’ve taken the extracurriculars. I’ve tried to make a good application for myself for colleges to be like, ‘Yes, that’s someone we want.'”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every day, she asks herself the same questions, over and over: “Am I going [to college] now? Am I going to the school that I want? 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"title": "Dartmouth will again require SAT, ACT scores. Other colleges won't necessarily follow",
"headTitle": "Dartmouth will again require SAT, ACT scores. Other colleges won’t necessarily follow | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Dartmouth College \u003ca href=\"https://admissions.dartmouth.edu/apply/update-testing-policy\">has announced\u003c/a> it will once again require applicants to submit standardized test scores, beginning with the next application cycle, for the class of 2029.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This comes after the Ivy League college, located in New Hampshire, opted to make test scores optional in 2020, citing the COVID-19 pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://home.dartmouth.edu/sites/home/files/2024-02/sat-undergrad-admissions.pdf\">A new study \u003c/a>conducted by the college found test scores could have helped less advantaged students, including first-generation students and students from low-income families, gain access to the school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We find ourselves missing out on some great students,” says Bruce Sacerdote, a Dartmouth economics professor and co-author of that study.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says students from disadvantaged backgrounds submitted their test scores at far lower rates, but their scores were high enough that they might have helped the students get in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We can see in the data: Oh wow, that student, boy, they had a 1450 … or a 1500 … We didn’t even know that. And they were not admitted to Dartmouth,” he says. “That is a really outstanding score. And, it would have been a great piece [of information] to have\u003cem>.\u003c/em>”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The study also found that test scores helped bring in students from high schools that didn’t already have a track record of sending students to Dartmouth.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>What works for Dartmouth won’t necessarily work for everyone\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>The Dartmouth study challenges the long-standing criticism that standardized tests, like the ACT and the College Board’s SAT, hurt students from marginalized backgrounds when it comes to admissions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2021/9/28/is-income-implicit-in-measures-of-student-ability\">Multiple\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/23/upshot/sat-inequality.html\">studies\u003c/a> have found a correlation between higher test scores and higher income. And in the high school class of 2020, Black and Latino students scored lower than white and Asian students on the math section of the SAT, \u003ca href=\"https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sat-math-scores-mirror-and-maintain-racial-inequity/\">according to the Brookings Institution\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A years-long movement to get rid of test requirements gained critical momentum when the pandemic hit and complicated students’ ability to take the exams.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The wave of test optional becomes a kind of tsunami,” says Harry Feder, executive director of FairTest, an advocacy organization that tracks test optional policies at colleges.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://fairtest.org/test-optional-list/\">According to FairTest\u003c/a>, more than 1,900 U.S. colleges and universities are currently “test optional,” meaning students can decide whether they want to submit their standardized test scores with their applications. One of the largest public systems in the country, California State University, \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2022/03/csu-entrance-requirement/\">removed\u003c/a> standardized testing from their admissions requirements in 2022.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But many of the schools that went test optional during the pandemic are now weighing whether to keep those flexible testing policies. And experts stress those policies aren’t one size fits all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m concerned that other very different universities will join the bandwagon of the return to the SAT without themselves considering carefully whether the SAT aligns with their admissions objectives,” says Zachary Bleemer, an assistant professor in economics at Princeton University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He’s done research looking at a program in California that admitted students with high GPAs and low test scores. They were able to take advantage of the universities’ opportunities and resources and turn them into a successful career that wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t been admitted. Bleemer says that \u003cem>access \u003c/em>is kind of the point of a publicly funded college. A small, private college, like Dartmouth, may have different objectives.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>College applications are always up for interpretation\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Sacerdote, at Dartmouth, acknowledges the inequities in the admissions process. But he says those inequities exist in the larger education system – not just in tests.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The job of an admissions office is to \u003cem>interpret \u003c/em>an application, including test scores – which means it all comes down to human judgment, and making sure application readers don’t get obsessed with the test the way culture sometimes does.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We have a lot of experience that says that people misinterpret and over emphasize numbers,” says Andrew Ho, an education professor at Harvard University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These are humans rendering judgments, right? And you hope that they have expertise. You \u003cem>trust \u003c/em>that they have expertise.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Or maybe, he says, you don’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Edited by: Nicole Cohen\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Dartmouth+will+again+require+SAT%2C+ACT+scores.+Other+colleges+won%27t+necessarily+follow&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Dartmouth College \u003ca href=\"https://admissions.dartmouth.edu/apply/update-testing-policy\">has announced\u003c/a> it will once again require applicants to submit standardized test scores, beginning with the next application cycle, for the class of 2029.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This comes after the Ivy League college, located in New Hampshire, opted to make test scores optional in 2020, citing the COVID-19 pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://home.dartmouth.edu/sites/home/files/2024-02/sat-undergrad-admissions.pdf\">A new study \u003c/a>conducted by the college found test scores could have helped less advantaged students, including first-generation students and students from low-income families, gain access to the school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We find ourselves missing out on some great students,” says Bruce Sacerdote, a Dartmouth economics professor and co-author of that study.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says students from disadvantaged backgrounds submitted their test scores at far lower rates, but their scores were high enough that they might have helped the students get in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We can see in the data: Oh wow, that student, boy, they had a 1450 … or a 1500 … We didn’t even know that. And they were not admitted to Dartmouth,” he says. “That is a really outstanding score. And, it would have been a great piece [of information] to have\u003cem>.\u003c/em>”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The study also found that test scores helped bring in students from high schools that didn’t already have a track record of sending students to Dartmouth.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>What works for Dartmouth won’t necessarily work for everyone\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>The Dartmouth study challenges the long-standing criticism that standardized tests, like the ACT and the College Board’s SAT, hurt students from marginalized backgrounds when it comes to admissions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2021/9/28/is-income-implicit-in-measures-of-student-ability\">Multiple\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/23/upshot/sat-inequality.html\">studies\u003c/a> have found a correlation between higher test scores and higher income. And in the high school class of 2020, Black and Latino students scored lower than white and Asian students on the math section of the SAT, \u003ca href=\"https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sat-math-scores-mirror-and-maintain-racial-inequity/\">according to the Brookings Institution\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A years-long movement to get rid of test requirements gained critical momentum when the pandemic hit and complicated students’ ability to take the exams.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The wave of test optional becomes a kind of tsunami,” says Harry Feder, executive director of FairTest, an advocacy organization that tracks test optional policies at colleges.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://fairtest.org/test-optional-list/\">According to FairTest\u003c/a>, more than 1,900 U.S. colleges and universities are currently “test optional,” meaning students can decide whether they want to submit their standardized test scores with their applications. One of the largest public systems in the country, California State University, \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2022/03/csu-entrance-requirement/\">removed\u003c/a> standardized testing from their admissions requirements in 2022.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But many of the schools that went test optional during the pandemic are now weighing whether to keep those flexible testing policies. And experts stress those policies aren’t one size fits all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m concerned that other very different universities will join the bandwagon of the return to the SAT without themselves considering carefully whether the SAT aligns with their admissions objectives,” says Zachary Bleemer, an assistant professor in economics at Princeton University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He’s done research looking at a program in California that admitted students with high GPAs and low test scores. They were able to take advantage of the universities’ opportunities and resources and turn them into a successful career that wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t been admitted. Bleemer says that \u003cem>access \u003c/em>is kind of the point of a publicly funded college. A small, private college, like Dartmouth, may have different objectives.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>College applications are always up for interpretation\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Sacerdote, at Dartmouth, acknowledges the inequities in the admissions process. But he says those inequities exist in the larger education system – not just in tests.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The job of an admissions office is to \u003cem>interpret \u003c/em>an application, including test scores – which means it all comes down to human judgment, and making sure application readers don’t get obsessed with the test the way culture sometimes does.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We have a lot of experience that says that people misinterpret and over emphasize numbers,” says Andrew Ho, an education professor at Harvard University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These are humans rendering judgments, right? And you hope that they have expertise. You \u003cem>trust \u003c/em>that they have expertise.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Or maybe, he says, you don’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Edited by: Nicole Cohen\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Dartmouth+will+again+require+SAT%2C+ACT+scores.+Other+colleges+won%27t+necessarily+follow&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "A new FAFSA setback means many college financial aid offers won't come until April",
"headTitle": "A new FAFSA setback means many college financial aid offers won’t come until April | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Families and students will have to wait even longer for financial aid offers from colleges and universities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Education announced yet another delay in the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/01/09/1222664638/fafsa-student-financial-aid-college\">already-turbulent FAFSA\u003c/a> (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) timeline: The department says it won’t be sending students’ FAFSA data to schools until the first half of March. Previously, it had said it would start sending that data in late January.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For more than 17 million students, the FAFSA is the key to unlocking government dollars to help cover the cost of college, including federal student loans, work-study and Pell Grants for low-income students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This new, four-to-six-week delay puts schools in a difficult bind as colleges can’t determine what financial aid students should get until they receive the government’s FAFSA data.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There is some good news: One big reason for the delay is that \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/01/23/1226406495/families-colleges-remain-limbo-education-department-promises-fix-fafsa-mistake\">the department is fixing a $1.8 billion mistake in the FAFSA\u003c/a> that could have especially hurt lower-income students. Proceeding without a fix would have, at best, confused many lower-income borrowers. At worst, it would have taken money out of their pockets and likely discouraged some from enrolling in college.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When that fix was announced, Justin Draeger, president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA), said it was “the right thing to do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Undersecretary of Education James Kvaal said in a statement Tuesday, “Updating our calculations will help students qualify for as much financial aid as possible. Thank you to the financial aid advisers, college counselors, and many others helping us put students first.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kvaal and the department know this delay will hit college financial aid offices especially hard and further compress their timeline for sending out financial aid offers. Draeger tells NPR that if schools don’t receive FAFSA data until early to mid-March, many of them likely won’t be able to send financial aid offers to students until April. For many of those students, that leaves less than a month before they’re expected to commit to a college.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charles Conn, a top aid administrator at Cal Poly Pomona, tells NPR he is “relieved” the Education Department is fixing that $1.8 billion mistake, but “our hearts sank as we learned that schools will now not begin receiving FAFSA data until the first part of March, at the earliest.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s going to be difficult to get aid offers out to prospective students before April,” says Brad Barnett, the financial aid director at James Madison University in Virginia. “It’s unfortunate that these delays could impact whether a prospective student goes to college at all this fall, or at the very least where they go.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem for schools — which, by extension, is now a problem for families too — is that, because this year’s FAFSA is the result of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2023/12/01/1216340219/the-updated-federal-student-aid-form-has-been-simplified#:~:text=NADWORNY%3A%20The%20form%20has%20been,easier%20to%20access%20financial%20information.\">a massive overhaul\u003c/a>, financial aid offices aren’t entirely sure what to expect from the data they’ll be receiving. Ideally, they’d like several weeks to understand the new datasets and do some quality control of the new financial aid process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Schools are furiously reworking their timelines to see just how quickly they could turn around financial aid offers for students, to get them accurate aid offers as soon as possible,” says Draeger of NASFAA. But he points out, “This could be more difficult for under-resourced institutions that lack the funding, staffing, or technology capabilities of their peers.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This new setback gives schools very little room for error.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scott Skaro, the financial aid director at United Tribes Technical College, in North Dakota, says this new FAFSA timeline will be tough on tribal colleges, where more than 80% of students are low income and qualify for a federal Pell Grant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is pretty devastating news,” says Skaro.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s good, he says, that the department is acting to make sure students get all the aid they’re entitled to, but not being able to make aid offers to prospective students until April or May could also do real harm.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our students rely on the peace of mind that comes with grant aid. And this uncertainty may lead them away from education. I don’t want the seniors of 2024 to be just a lost generation.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He worries that the longer seniors have to wait to know if college is affordable, the harder it will be for some to resist “the temptations to just find some entry-level job and give up on additional schooling. I just worry how many there are out there.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=A+new+FAFSA+setback+means+many+college+financial+aid+offers+won%27t+come+until+April&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Families and students will have to wait even longer for financial aid offers from colleges and universities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Education announced yet another delay in the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/01/09/1222664638/fafsa-student-financial-aid-college\">already-turbulent FAFSA\u003c/a> (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) timeline: The department says it won’t be sending students’ FAFSA data to schools until the first half of March. Previously, it had said it would start sending that data in late January.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For more than 17 million students, the FAFSA is the key to unlocking government dollars to help cover the cost of college, including federal student loans, work-study and Pell Grants for low-income students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This new, four-to-six-week delay puts schools in a difficult bind as colleges can’t determine what financial aid students should get until they receive the government’s FAFSA data.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There is some good news: One big reason for the delay is that \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/01/23/1226406495/families-colleges-remain-limbo-education-department-promises-fix-fafsa-mistake\">the department is fixing a $1.8 billion mistake in the FAFSA\u003c/a> that could have especially hurt lower-income students. Proceeding without a fix would have, at best, confused many lower-income borrowers. At worst, it would have taken money out of their pockets and likely discouraged some from enrolling in college.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When that fix was announced, Justin Draeger, president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA), said it was “the right thing to do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Undersecretary of Education James Kvaal said in a statement Tuesday, “Updating our calculations will help students qualify for as much financial aid as possible. Thank you to the financial aid advisers, college counselors, and many others helping us put students first.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kvaal and the department know this delay will hit college financial aid offices especially hard and further compress their timeline for sending out financial aid offers. Draeger tells NPR that if schools don’t receive FAFSA data until early to mid-March, many of them likely won’t be able to send financial aid offers to students until April. For many of those students, that leaves less than a month before they’re expected to commit to a college.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charles Conn, a top aid administrator at Cal Poly Pomona, tells NPR he is “relieved” the Education Department is fixing that $1.8 billion mistake, but “our hearts sank as we learned that schools will now not begin receiving FAFSA data until the first part of March, at the earliest.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s going to be difficult to get aid offers out to prospective students before April,” says Brad Barnett, the financial aid director at James Madison University in Virginia. “It’s unfortunate that these delays could impact whether a prospective student goes to college at all this fall, or at the very least where they go.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem for schools — which, by extension, is now a problem for families too — is that, because this year’s FAFSA is the result of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2023/12/01/1216340219/the-updated-federal-student-aid-form-has-been-simplified#:~:text=NADWORNY%3A%20The%20form%20has%20been,easier%20to%20access%20financial%20information.\">a massive overhaul\u003c/a>, financial aid offices aren’t entirely sure what to expect from the data they’ll be receiving. Ideally, they’d like several weeks to understand the new datasets and do some quality control of the new financial aid process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Schools are furiously reworking their timelines to see just how quickly they could turn around financial aid offers for students, to get them accurate aid offers as soon as possible,” says Draeger of NASFAA. But he points out, “This could be more difficult for under-resourced institutions that lack the funding, staffing, or technology capabilities of their peers.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This new setback gives schools very little room for error.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scott Skaro, the financial aid director at United Tribes Technical College, in North Dakota, says this new FAFSA timeline will be tough on tribal colleges, where more than 80% of students are low income and qualify for a federal Pell Grant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is pretty devastating news,” says Skaro.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s good, he says, that the department is acting to make sure students get all the aid they’re entitled to, but not being able to make aid offers to prospective students until April or May could also do real harm.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our students rely on the peace of mind that comes with grant aid. And this uncertainty may lead them away from education. I don’t want the seniors of 2024 to be just a lost generation.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He worries that the longer seniors have to wait to know if college is affordable, the harder it will be for some to resist “the temptations to just find some entry-level job and give up on additional schooling. I just worry how many there are out there.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=A+new+FAFSA+setback+means+many+college+financial+aid+offers+won%27t+come+until+April&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "The Education Department says it will fix its $1.8 billion FAFSA mistake",
"headTitle": "The Education Department says it will fix its $1.8 billion FAFSA mistake | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Families have a lot of questions right now about how much help they’ll get paying for college — questions that financial aid offices can’t yet answer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s because this year’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is months behind schedule. And to make things \u003cem>really\u003c/em> complicated, it includes a mistake that would have cost students $1.8 billion in federal student aid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/01/09/1222664638/fafsa-student-financial-aid-college\">We covered the mistake in detail here\u003c/a>. In a nutshell: The U.S. Education Department’s FAFSA math, for deciding how much aid a student should get, is wrong.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In practice, this mistake would make some students and families appear to have more income than they really do, and that means they would get less aid than they should. And not just federal financial aid but also all sorts of state and school-based aid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Tuesday, a department spokesperson confirmed to NPR that the department will fix this mistake in time for the 2024-2025 award year, though the spokesperson could not provide details on how or how quickly the fix will be made. For the first time, the department also gave a sense of just how much federal student aid is at stake: $1.8 billion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to making higher education possible for more students, including through ensuring students qualify for as much financial aid as possible,” the spokesperson said in a statement.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The FAFSA mistake had college financial aid offices worried\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>“The polite way to say it is, wow. I mean, I was shocked.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s how Brad Barnett, the financial aid director at James Madison University in Virginia, describes learning about the mistake.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I get that there’s complexities in building and programming a new system. OK. But forgetting to put the right numbers into a table that now has created all this consternation and delays really surprised me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The FAFSA is new this year because Congress passed a law ordering the Education Department to make sweeping changes. The idea was to make it easier to fill out and to give more lower-income families access to federal aid. Families like Myrna Aguilar’s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I am a single parent. In addition to my son, my mom lives with us, so we’re a multigenerational family, which is awesome,” Aguilar told NPR.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Aguilar’s son, David Thornton, is studying mechanical engineering at Cal Poly Pomona in Southern California, where he just finished his first semester.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was fun,” Thornton says, wearing a hooded sweatshirt emblazoned with “Cal Poly Pomona College of Engineering.” “There were a lot of events that I really enjoyed. My classes were very interesting. Stressful, but interesting.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thornton got lots of help paying for college, including a $1,500 Pell Grant from the U.S. government. Pell Grants are for lower-income students and don’t need to be paid back. That’s important because after Thornton filled out the new FAFSA a couple of weeks ago, the Education Department sent him an email with a surprise: Next year, it says, he’s going to lose that $1,500 Pell Grant, though it’s unclear why.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That actually is equivalent to an extra mortgage payment,” Aguilar says. “That’s, you know, inconvenient.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She insists this won’t keep her son from returning to Cal Poly, which he loves. She’ll save and fill the gap, if that’s what it takes. But she wants to know: Why did this happen?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It \u003cem>could \u003c/em>be because of the department’s FAFSA mistake. Financial aid experts tell NPR it’s difficult at this point to know for certain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re in a situation where we really can’t help students or their families,” says Charles Conn, a top aid administrator at Thornton’s university, Cal Poly Pomona. “They’re getting some information from the Department of Ed. We’re not\u003cem>.”\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because of this year’s big FAFSA overhaul, Conn says, the Education Department is really behind, and it’s telling colleges they won’t be getting any financial aid data for students like Thornton until the end of this month, at the earliest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[That] really cripples our office and our ability to fulfill our role, which is to help students and their families make sense of all of this,” Conn says. That includes helping Thornton and Aguilar understand what happened to his Pell Grant.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>With no details on the fix, financial aid timelines are still in the air\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>The Education Department says it will fix the FAFSA mistake this year, but it did not clarify how or when. And it’s unclear what impact any fix would have on universities’ financial aid timelines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before the department shared its decision, NPR spoke with a dozen financial aid experts and administrators across the U.S. — at colleges big and small, public and private — to hear how \u003cem>they\u003c/em> think the department should manage a potential fix.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t know what the best option is. None of them are good,” says Karen Krause, the executive director of financial aid for the University of Texas at Arlington.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Option 1: The Education Department can try to fix this quickly, before it sends any student FAFSA data on to colleges.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem with that option is that even a quick fix will take time, further delaying the student data that universities need. Without that data, colleges can’t even begin to come up with financial aid offers to send to families.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s nausea-inducing,” says Christina Tangalakis, who manages student aid for Glendale Community College, in Glendale, California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s also an option 2, she says, where the fix takes long enough that the department has to go ahead and send colleges data it knows is wrong, with a promise to update the data as soon as it can. That way, colleges can at least give families something, a kind of starting point. But Tangalakis worries that for many lower-income students, those preliminary award letters would be too low.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“How many students will be discouraged by what they see on paper and not even attend?” Tangalakis says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We heard this fear a lot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our students absolutely are relying on this,” says Scott Skaro, the financial aid director at United Tribes Technical College, in North Dakota.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says tribal colleges will be hit especially hard by this uncertainty because more than 80% of their students qualify for a federal Pell Grant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[Students] may just go find some low-paying job that’s gonna pay the bills now, and they’ll just give up on school,” Skaro worries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Robert Muhammad, director of financial aid at Howard University, shares that concern.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Some students may truly feel defeated and decide not to pursue their education at this time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most of the financial aid experts told NPR that they want the department to hurry up and make this fix now, before any award letters go out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Is that realistic? Tangalakis, of Glendale Community College, says that shouldn’t matter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When we were headed to space, Kennedy said we do things because they’re hard. This is something hard, but it’s necessary.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many students have just over three months left before they’re expected to commit to a college. But colleges say that in the best case, it will still be weeks before they can begin sending out financial aid offers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At this point, for families, universities and the Education Department, the clock isn’t just ticking. It’s roaring.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Exclusive%3A+The+Education+Department+says+it+will+fix+its+%241.8+billion+FAFSA+mistake&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Families have a lot of questions right now about how much help they’ll get paying for college — questions that financial aid offices can’t yet answer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s because this year’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is months behind schedule. And to make things \u003cem>really\u003c/em> complicated, it includes a mistake that would have cost students $1.8 billion in federal student aid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/01/09/1222664638/fafsa-student-financial-aid-college\">We covered the mistake in detail here\u003c/a>. In a nutshell: The U.S. Education Department’s FAFSA math, for deciding how much aid a student should get, is wrong.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In practice, this mistake would make some students and families appear to have more income than they really do, and that means they would get less aid than they should. And not just federal financial aid but also all sorts of state and school-based aid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Tuesday, a department spokesperson confirmed to NPR that the department will fix this mistake in time for the 2024-2025 award year, though the spokesperson could not provide details on how or how quickly the fix will be made. For the first time, the department also gave a sense of just how much federal student aid is at stake: $1.8 billion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to making higher education possible for more students, including through ensuring students qualify for as much financial aid as possible,” the spokesperson said in a statement.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The FAFSA mistake had college financial aid offices worried\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>“The polite way to say it is, wow. I mean, I was shocked.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s how Brad Barnett, the financial aid director at James Madison University in Virginia, describes learning about the mistake.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I get that there’s complexities in building and programming a new system. OK. But forgetting to put the right numbers into a table that now has created all this consternation and delays really surprised me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The FAFSA is new this year because Congress passed a law ordering the Education Department to make sweeping changes. The idea was to make it easier to fill out and to give more lower-income families access to federal aid. Families like Myrna Aguilar’s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I am a single parent. In addition to my son, my mom lives with us, so we’re a multigenerational family, which is awesome,” Aguilar told NPR.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Aguilar’s son, David Thornton, is studying mechanical engineering at Cal Poly Pomona in Southern California, where he just finished his first semester.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was fun,” Thornton says, wearing a hooded sweatshirt emblazoned with “Cal Poly Pomona College of Engineering.” “There were a lot of events that I really enjoyed. My classes were very interesting. Stressful, but interesting.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thornton got lots of help paying for college, including a $1,500 Pell Grant from the U.S. government. Pell Grants are for lower-income students and don’t need to be paid back. That’s important because after Thornton filled out the new FAFSA a couple of weeks ago, the Education Department sent him an email with a surprise: Next year, it says, he’s going to lose that $1,500 Pell Grant, though it’s unclear why.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That actually is equivalent to an extra mortgage payment,” Aguilar says. “That’s, you know, inconvenient.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She insists this won’t keep her son from returning to Cal Poly, which he loves. She’ll save and fill the gap, if that’s what it takes. But she wants to know: Why did this happen?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It \u003cem>could \u003c/em>be because of the department’s FAFSA mistake. Financial aid experts tell NPR it’s difficult at this point to know for certain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re in a situation where we really can’t help students or their families,” says Charles Conn, a top aid administrator at Thornton’s university, Cal Poly Pomona. “They’re getting some information from the Department of Ed. We’re not\u003cem>.”\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because of this year’s big FAFSA overhaul, Conn says, the Education Department is really behind, and it’s telling colleges they won’t be getting any financial aid data for students like Thornton until the end of this month, at the earliest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[That] really cripples our office and our ability to fulfill our role, which is to help students and their families make sense of all of this,” Conn says. That includes helping Thornton and Aguilar understand what happened to his Pell Grant.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>With no details on the fix, financial aid timelines are still in the air\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>The Education Department says it will fix the FAFSA mistake this year, but it did not clarify how or when. And it’s unclear what impact any fix would have on universities’ financial aid timelines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before the department shared its decision, NPR spoke with a dozen financial aid experts and administrators across the U.S. — at colleges big and small, public and private — to hear how \u003cem>they\u003c/em> think the department should manage a potential fix.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t know what the best option is. None of them are good,” says Karen Krause, the executive director of financial aid for the University of Texas at Arlington.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Option 1: The Education Department can try to fix this quickly, before it sends any student FAFSA data on to colleges.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem with that option is that even a quick fix will take time, further delaying the student data that universities need. Without that data, colleges can’t even begin to come up with financial aid offers to send to families.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s nausea-inducing,” says Christina Tangalakis, who manages student aid for Glendale Community College, in Glendale, California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s also an option 2, she says, where the fix takes long enough that the department has to go ahead and send colleges data it knows is wrong, with a promise to update the data as soon as it can. That way, colleges can at least give families something, a kind of starting point. 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"info": "Every week, The California Report Magazine takes you on a road trip for the ears: to visit the places and meet the people who make California unique. The in-depth storytelling podcast from the California Report.",
"airtime": "FRI 4:30pm-5pm, 6:30pm-7pm, 11pm-11:30pm",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/californiareportmagazine",
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"order": 10
},
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},
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"id": "city-arts",
"title": "City Arts & Lectures",
"info": "A one-hour radio program to hear celebrated writers, artists and thinkers address contemporary ideas and values, often discussing the creative process. Please note: tapes or transcripts are not available",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/05/cityartsandlecture-300x300.jpg",
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"airtime": "SUN 1pm-2pm, TUE 10pm, WED 1am",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "City Arts & Lectures"
},
"link": "https://www.cityarts.net",
"subscribe": {
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"rss": "https://www.cityarts.net/feed/"
}
},
"closealltabs": {
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"info": "Close All Tabs breaks down how digital culture shapes our world through thoughtful insights and irreverent humor.",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/closealltabs",
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"order": 1
},
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"title": "Code Switch / Life Kit",
"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"meta": {
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubnByLm9yZy9yc3MvcG9kY2FzdC5waHA_aWQ9NTEwMzEy",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
"airtime": "THU 10pm, FRI 1am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Commonwealth-Club-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"meta": {
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"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
"link": "/radio/program/commonwealth-club",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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},
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"id": "forum",
"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 9am-11am, 10pm-11pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Forum with Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 9
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5NTU3MzgxNjMz",
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"id": "freakonomics-radio",
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"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/freakonomicsRadio.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
"airtime": "SUN 1am-2am, SAT 3pm-4pm",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
"subscribe": {
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
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},
"fresh-air": {
"id": "fresh-air",
"title": "Fresh Air",
"info": "Hosted by Terry Gross, \u003cem>Fresh Air from WHYY\u003c/em> is the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues. One of public radio's most popular programs, Fresh Air features intimate conversations with today's biggest luminaries.",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/381444908/podcast.xml"
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510051/podcast.xml"
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},
"hidden-brain": {
"id": "hidden-brain",
"title": "Hidden Brain",
"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/series/423302056/hidden-brain",
"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "NPR"
},
"link": "/radio/program/hidden-brain",
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},
"how-i-built-this": {
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"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/howIBuiltThis.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this",
"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
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"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/3zxy",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?mt=2",
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"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
"title": "Hyphenación",
"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"order": 15
},
"link": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/2p3Fifq96nw9BPcmFdIq0o?si=39209f7b25774f38",
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},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 18
},
"link": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
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}
},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
"meta": {
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},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace-pm/rss/rss"
}
},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
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"source": "WaitWhat"
},
"link": "/radio/program/masters-of-scale",
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"apple": "http://mastersofscale.app.link/",
"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "On Our Watch from NPR and KQED",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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}
},
"on-the-media": {
"id": "on-the-media",
"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm-3pm, MON 12am-1am",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/onTheMedia.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/otm",
"meta": {
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"source": "wnyc"
},
"link": "/radio/program/on-the-media",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/on-the-media/id73330715?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/On-the-Media-p69/",
"rss": "http://feeds.wnyc.org/onthemedia"
}
},
"pbs-newshour": {
"id": "pbs-newshour",
"title": "PBS NewsHour",
"info": "Analysis, background reports and updates from the PBS NewsHour putting today's news in context.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/PBS-News-Hour-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/",
"meta": {
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"source": "pbs"
},
"link": "/radio/program/pbs-newshour",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pbs-newshour-full-show/id394432287?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/PBS-NewsHour---Full-Show-p425698/",
"rss": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/feeds/rss/podcasts/show"
}
},
"perspectives": {
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