Changes have been made to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, program. While that could mean trouble for new applicants, there are paths to take for assistance.
The new FAFSA form has changes made to the front and back ends, which means while simplifying the process, there have been bumps in the road.
Just this week, the Department of Education announced next year’s FAFSA forms will not be available until December, two months behind the regular schedule.
Black Hills State University financial aid director Tirzah Knight said there is still some good in this rollout.
“They’ve rolled out a completely new form, and it has fewer questions and we’ve gotten good feedback from students and families that it is easier and quicker to complete," Knight said. "They’ve also been updating the backside processing form system, and it’s been about 40 years since they’ve done any kind of rehaul like that.”
Despite the positives there have been serious challenges, including some students still waiting to hear back on their student aid applications as the year fast approaches. Knight said BH has avoided the worst of it.
“We did have some families that were affected when they were implementing the new form, and it was only open for certain periods of time," Knight said. "Once they were able to get everything working on their side, I would say there’s routine maintenance we’ve seen in the past happening but no big outages.”
There are paths to take if you run into a wall on the FAFSA though.
“For the most part, the student and family are going to have to contact Federal Student Aid," Knight said. "We as institutions don’t have access to the federal side of things, but sometimes we’ve seen a family run into a weird situation and they’ve reached out and we’ve troubleshooted some of the known issues and we’ve been able to walk them through completing the form.”
With these changes in mind, Knight recommends students considering higher education fill out the FAFSA. She says there is no impact to credit or obligation to take federal aid simply for filling the form out.