Go to college.
“I promised my mom I would go to college,” said Daniel Mercado, 17, a soccer player at Wheaton High School in Maryland who wants to study accounting.
And he thought getting in was going to be the difficult part.
Then, the notice came from Hood College that showed him his hard work had paid off. He got in! And he got a spot as a left back on the Hood Blazers soccer team. But since January, he’s been wrestling with the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, whose acronym, FAFSA, has nearly reached curse word status because of the headaches it has caused.
“Me and my mom were sad and a little upset,” Mercado said of the process. For the last four months, he had been receiving an error message when trying to access the status of the aid he needs to keep his promise to his mom.
The nationwide catastrophe that’s become this year’s “Better FAFSA” process is delaying deadlines and decisions. Ordinarily, the FAFSA applications open in October, giving students plenty of time to know whether their financial aid package will cover their education.
But this application cycle, after Congress ordered up a streamlined application process, the forms didn’t open until December. And they’re as buggy as an August night in the Everglades. Students don’t know if they can afford college, and as a result, schools across the nation are having their registration and housing systems gummed up during the time when all of this should be lining up.
That’s frustrating. But what’s heartbreaking is that the fiasco is having an outsize impact on students like Mercado.
“The glitches impact the scholars we serve, first-generation-to-college scholars and scholars from low-income and immigrant households,” said Mecha Inman, the CEO of CollegeTracks, a Montgomery County program that helps students like Mercado navigate the college adventure. “But it’s also that their more affluent peers have already been able to enroll in college.”
So while Mercado and thousands of other students keep getting error messages or spend hours on hold trying to get a human to help them file their forms, kids whose parents know they’ll be able to fork over $20,000 (or much, much more) next year are already selecting the best classes, getting the plum housing assignments, meeting their roommates and wearing their college colors in high school.
And that inequity is hardest on those who were most skeptical of the college dream.
“I’m the first one in my family to go,” said Angel Diaz, 20, who is finishing his sophomore year at the University of Maryland. “And even in my senior year of high school, I wasn’t sure I’d make it.”
His mom cleans houses and his dad is in construction. Diaz figured his life would look something like theirs, so he enrolled in a carpentry trade school during his junior year of high school.
“But it I didn’t really like it,” he said. Numbers, he loved numbers. And he began to wonder if there was a way for him to make a living in a world that terrifies so many of us: banking or economics.
With the help of the CollegeTracks counselors, Diaz knocked down all the hurdles — financial, emotional, logistical. He was accepted to the University of Maryland and is steering toward a degree in economics. It’s been a great ride, until now.
“My mom doesn’t have a Social Security number, so I can’t fill out her part of the form and it’s putting the whole thing on hold for me,” he said.
He’s going to keep trying.
That’s the plan, too, for Angad Bedi, 20, who is also a sophomore at the University of Maryland and in FAFSA limbo because his mom doesn’t have a Social Security number — an omission that makes the new FAFSA form glitch out.
“It’s just an endless circle right now,” said Bedi, whose parents immigrated from India with the dream that their children would attend college.
“If the financial aid doesn’t come through, it becomes a big burden on my family,” said Bedi, who is studying data analytics.
Both Diaz and Bedi say they’re going to work over the summer, save and hope the FAFSA mess works itself out.
But those in the field say that not everyone shares their optimism.
“There is absolutely the fear that students will give up,” said Lee Andes, the interim director of finance policy and innovation and associate director for financial aid at the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.
Andes is working with colleges and universities to push back some of their deadlines to make room for the students falling through the FAFSA cracks.
Erin McGrath, assistant director of college access and PK-12 outreach for the same organization, said the likelihood that students in this group will give up is high.
“Any barrier you put up against a first-generation student is taller, it’s a larger barrier than it would be for a student that has a family that has already gone through this,” McGrath said.
It’s making a tough process terrifying, said Rachel Lostumbo, a college success director at CollegeTracks.
“They’ve all worked so hard and now they’re powerless,” she said.
Then, after we talked about the issues, she reached out to me with some good news.
Mercado got the message that his financial aid went through. The shifts he’s been pulling at Kohl’s will give him a cushion. But the rest will be covered.
“What I got is called a Pell Grant,” he told me. I could see the smile in his voice. “And it means I’m going.”
Lostumbo was happy for Mercado, but she had another name for it: “A drop in the bucket.”
