Completing FAFSA — the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, required by US colleges to establish eligibility for financial aid — has always been a headache. Given the astronomical cost of college in America, over half of US college students rely on this aid to pursue higher education. So they persevere and fill out the forms, detailing their financial information and that of their parents in a process that, ideally, should take less than an hour. This college application season, though, one group of students says the FAFSA is fully locking them out: students who have undocumented parents. As a result, many applicants are stuck in limbo, uncertain whether they’ll be able to afford the fall semester.
The Department of Education (DOE) has pushed its FAFSA filing deadline back several times this year due to a series of issues. But students, teachers, and college counselors tell Teen Vogue that, while they’ve received some communication about other FAFSA problems, they haven’t heard anything from the DOE about when the glitch that is affecting students from immigrant families will be resolved.
In previous years, if a parent didn’t have a social security number, they were able to print out a form, sign it, and send it in. This year, that option doesn’t exist on the website.
Twenty-year-old Josh (who has asked to use a pseudonym due to his father’s undocumented status) is a third-year student at San Francisco State University, and one of many applicants who have spent weeks since the FAFSA’s late-December release appealing to a very unofficial resource for advice: the Reddit R/FAFSA forum. When FAFSA would not let Josh complete his family’s income information because his undocumented father does not have a social security number, he looked to his fellow posters for assistance.
Students and parents commiserate on the forum: “Fafsa hates undocumented parents,” one student posted, tagged #ranting/venting. Another poster wrote, “want to have a talk with whoever thought changing the whole process was a good idea… [at this point] it feels like they're purposely making it hard for people with undocumented parents/spouses...” Others have posted memes featuring the pop-up that seems to appear on people’s screens over and over: “unknown error.”
“Social media has been an incredible reassurance when it comes to the errors I’ve received,” Adwoa Obeng, 17, a high school senior in Maryland, tells Teen Vogue. “It’s reassuring to know that it’s not just me facing these problems.”
Obeng’s parents are US citizens, so she has been able to submit the required information; but, she says, the form should have gone to her for a signature after, and it didn’t. Meanwhile, she explains, she’s unable to edit her form while it’s “processing.” (A spokesperson for the Department of Education tells Teen Vogue that students will be able to make corrections to their forms in mid-March.)
That means Obeng won’t have long to commit to a school after her form has been corrected. “I simply don’t have the luxury of picking the school without knowing how much I need to pay,” she says. “This leaves me with little time to weigh my options before decision day on May 1.”
Josh from San Francisco State is also feeling the pressure. “I have had my work doubled,” he says. “It’s a huge burden for students like me, whose parents are not tech-savvy [and don’t] speak English.” Josh is currently working on getting his father’s federal student aid (FSA) ID verified.
A DOE representative, when asked if requests for FSA IDs for undocumented parents are being processed right now, says, “Applicants and contributors with or without a social security number can create an FSA ID, and we encourage everyone to do so because having an FSA ID before you start the form leads to a better experience.” The representative also notes that they are working on fixing the issue that doesn’t allow contributors without a social security number to actually submit the form. The representative directs those with concerns to reference a YouTube video created last month that explains how to create an FSA ID.
Josh has tried to follow those instructions, but hasn’t yet heard whether his request went through. A representative told him, via FAFSA’s live chat, that his father’s account would be verified in “five to seven business days or longer,” but Josh says he’s already waited two weeks. “The FAFSA in past years has been difficult,” he adds, “now they made it impossible to get it started.”
When students call the FAFSA hotline, they’re usually routed to an automated message telling them to “please try again in a few days” due to “historically high call volume” — then the line goes dead. Some students call very early in the morning or very late at night, but even these tactics don’t guarantee they’ll get through to an actual person. (For this story, I call the hotline several times; I am not able to speak with an agent once.)
Congress mandated an overhaul of the FAFSA system in 2020, to make the form easier to complete, and to open eligibility for scholarships like Pell Grants to a greater number of people. But the rollout of the form has been plagued with issues, and not just for those with undocumented parents. Other groups of students, especially those whose parents don’t speak English or otherwise struggle to complete the form, find themselves facing this challenge alone.
Those attempting to navigate the process say they’re left to work with a website that perpetually crashes, signature boxes that appear and disappear, and one particular form that, according to a student on Reddit, refuses to advance to the next page unless you press the back and forward buttons in a specific sequence, almost like a video game cheat code.
There have also been more structural issues, including, most pressingly, an error in calculations that would have meant $1.8 billion fewer aid dollars would have gone to lower-income students. The Department of Education stated in late January that it would fix the issue in time for financial aid to be distributed for this coming school year. And on February 5, the DOE announced that it will allocate $50 million to nonprofit groups to assist colleges with FAFSA processing amid the delays, with a focus on “under-resourced colleges.”
So far, though, the glitch that prevents students with undocumented parents from applying remains unresolved — and, in official channels, largely unacknowledged, other than one entry on the alert page.
As of 2019, about 3.9 million of the children enrolled in K-12 schools in the US had at least one undocumented parent, which likely means that thousands of people are affected by this FAFSA glitch. The FAFSA Issue Alerts website shows that this problem has been known since at least January 4, within a week of the application's launch.
Teachers, college counselors, and financial aid professionals say they’ve been doing their best to address FAFSA’s many issues this year, which, they add, are causing tremendous anxiety in the students they’re helping. When the Department of Education rolled out 2024's new FAFSA, it was marketed as a simpler, more streamlined version of the form.
Teresa Steinkamp works with the Scholarship Foundation of St. Louis, a nonprofit that supports hundreds of low-income students as they work their way through the college application process each year. While some students might actually have an easier time with the new form, she says, others — including many of the students she works with — are unable to submit theirs and feeling stuck.
Some schools have compensated for this by pushing decision deadlines to May 15 or June 1, but that’s a scattered effort rather than a nationwide solution. Meanwhile, students worry “first-come, first-served” scholarships might dry up.
“These students need the support that is entitled to them by their government,” Steinkamp tells Teen Vogue. “Without a fix in sight or a timeline for a fix, students are understandably concerned about whether or not they’ll even be able to go [to college] in the fall, because they aren’t sure when or if they’re going to be able to submit the FAFSA.”
The paper version of the FAFSA doesn’t require an ID number from undocumented parents, so some of the families Steinkamp works with have sent in this option rather than deal with the online portal. But it’s not clear to her when the paper forms will be processed — or if they will end up taking longer to handle than the online forms.
Last week, the Department of Education announced that, due to the delayed rollout and the ongoing problems with FAFSA, it will not be sending student aid information to colleges before the first half of March, at the earliest. That means students may not receive financial aid estimates from colleges until April, which would leave them only weeks to decide where to go to school. In previous years, this has happened much earlier. That makes college counselors, such as Monica Nickolai of Collegiate School of Medicine and Bioscience in St. Louis, worry that students will approach high school graduation without any knowledge of whether they’ll be able to afford college.
This year’s class of high school seniors started ninth grade with remote education and are now nearing the end of high school with scholarships up in the air. That accident of timing weighs heavily on Nickolai: “It’s another layer of confusion and concern that is being put on this population of students that has already… gone through so many changes.” As students nationwide struggle to make up for the academic impact of the pandemic, she worries this year’s class will depend more on need-based financial aid than those before them — and that they’ll be less able to access it. “It’s not their fault, you know?”
In the meantime, advisors like Nickolai and Steinkamp have a limited set of tools at their disposal, and even they are often left to turn to Reddit for solutions. “I’ve been helping students with FAFSA since 2015," Nickolai says. "I should not be having to resort to Reddit to help students troubleshoot issues with the revised FAFSA, but here we are.”
In general, these advisors are asking students — all students experiencing FAFSA glitches, not just those with undocumented parents — to email their colleges of choice to let them know what’s going on and ask for accommodations.
Obeng tried emailing her schools and has had some success. “Most of them have emailed me back acknowledging the FAFSA delay and stressing to students that they understand the whole process has been difficult,” she says. That’s made the waiting period “a bit more reassuring.”
Josh at San Francisco State hasn’t received any communication from his college yet about the status of his aid as a child of undocumented parents, though the college has sent emails about general FAFSA glitches. A spokesperson for San Francisco State says they have not communicated about this issue, in particular, due to student privacy concerns, and because they are also waiting to hear from the Department of Education.
Josh, meanwhile, is still waiting to complete his FAFSA. He doesn’t blame his school for not addressing the issue directly: “At the end of the day, they can’t do much,” he says. “I think even they don’t know what is going on.”
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