More than 90,000 college students in Arizona have at least one undocumented parent, and sweeping changes to federal student aid policy are leaving many of them unable to complete applications that are critical to their ability to pay for school.
The rollout of the 2024-2025 Free Application for Federal Student Aid has been plagued with delays and mistakes as the U.S. Department of Education enacts updates to make the form easier to fill out and increase the number of students who can access federal help.
The application determines a student’s income eligibility for a bevy of grants, scholarships, loans and work-study programs. For many students, it can mean the difference between enrolling in college or deciding not to.
Nineteen-year-old Xiomara Flores was looking forward to becoming an Arizona State Sun Devil in the fall and beginning work on a biomedical sciences or business degree, with designs on a career either as a physician’s assistant or in business management.
But when it came time to fill out her FAFSA application, she hit a wall: The teen’s parents are undocumented immigrants from Mexico, and the new FAFSA form has so far been unable to accept the income information of parents who don’t have a legal immigration status. That information is necessary to complete the application, leaving Flores and others like her at a standstill, worried about their financial aid prospects.
Flores said it’s disheartening to qualify in every other way, but consistently face obstacles simply because her parents aren’t citizens.
“It feels like a setback,” she said. “You feel like you’re almost there to the finish line, but there’s always just that one thing that’s stopping you. And it seems to always be that one thing.”
The inability of parents without social security numbers to help their children fill out the FAFSA form has been an issue since at least the first week of January, when the Department of Education added the complaint to its list of unresolved problems. A spokesperson for the department told the Arizona Mirror that the agency is working to fix the glitch, and advised students to get as much done ahead of time as possible, including creating an FSA ID for their parents to log into the application so that, when a solution is developed, finishing the process can be quicker.
On Jan. 30, the department announced that issues with the new form would result in a significant delay for all applicants. Student income eligibility data won’t arrive at universities and colleges until March, forcing Arizona’s three public universities to push their FAFSA submission deadlines to May.
“Once the Department of Education shares your FAFSA data with us, ASU, NAU and UArizona teams will work promptly to provide financial aid information as soon as possible so that students and their families can have a clear understanding of their cost of attendance and financial assistance opportunities,” the schools wrote in a joint statement.
Originally, the FAFSA priority deadline for Arizona State University was March 1, and both Northern Arizona University and the University of Arizona had set theirs at April 1. Those deadlines help universities determine how much financial aid students can receive. And key scholarships, like the Arizona Promise Program, which helps cover the leftover costs for Pell Grant recipients (awarded by the federal government to low income students who fill out the FAFSA application), also structure their timelines around the release of FAFSA eligibility information.
But while delays can be responded to by adjusting deadlines, the issue students with immigrant parents are dealing with is more complicated to address. Applicants without that problem are able to complete and submit their FAFSA forms ahead of time. Latino education groups are sounding the alarm on behalf of second-generation Arizonans, worried that they’ll be…
This article was originally published by a azmirror.com . Read the Original article here. .