A
growing number of colleges and universities, public and private, are taking
action to help admitted students have adequate time to compare financial aid
offers in the wake of the Department of Education’s (ED) rollout of the new Free
Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form, which has been plagued with
glitches and delays for the past month. ACE now
counts dozens of institutions that have extended their traditional May 1
deadline for enrollment commitments in response.
ACE
and nine other associations issued
a joint statement encouraging institutions
to exercise flexibility when it comes to enrollment and financial aid
deadlines. Among them are campuses of two systems in the nation’s most populous
state—the University of California and California State University. Others that
have announced extensions in recent days include Williams College, The Ohio
State University, Kalamazoo College, Virginia Tech, Mount St. Mary's University
(MD), and the University of Virginia.
ACE has published an
online list of these schools and is
encouraging others to take similar action. If your institution has extended a
May 1 deadline and is not on this list, please reach out to Nick Anderson, vice
president of higher education partnerships and improvement, at nanderson@acenet.edu.
Meanwhile, ED
this week announced
more plans to help colleges and universities address the
ongoing challenges with the rollout of the new FAFSA. Along with plans
released earlier this month, ED is now taking the following steps
to alleviate the burden on institutions:
Reducing verification
requirements: This will free up resources for
colleges and universities to process more applications more quickly.
Suspending program reviews: This will provide temporary relief for smaller institutions
that may be struggling to meet compliance requirements.
Releasing test versions of institutional
student information records (ISIRs): This
will allow institutions to begin preparing their systems for processing
aid offers once real ISIRs become available.
Additional funding and staff
dedicated to addressing problems: This
includes deploying federal personnel to help colleges prepare and process
financial aid forms; directing funding for technical assistance and
support for under resourced colleges; and releasing tools to help colleges
prepare to process student records and deliver financial aid packages.
While these are
positive steps, more needs to be done. ACE will continue to advocate for a faster
fix to the technical glitches, regular updates from ED on the progress it is
making, clear expectations for when real ISIRs will be available, and additional
resources for institutions that are facing increased costs due to the FAFSA
delays.