SOUTH CHARLESTON, W.Va. — BridgeValley Community and Technical College President Casey Sacks says ongoing problems with the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, commonly called FAFSA, continue to impact students this coming school year.
Casey Sacks
Sacks told the BridgeValley Board of Governors on Friday the college will not be able to submit corrections in bulk to update students’ financial aid records.
“We’ve been told until this morning from the Department of Education that they would batch correct errors that we were seeing because it’s not a BridgeValley error. It’s a national error. We heard today that they are not going to batch correct them and that our financial aid staff are going to have to go in individually and identify students’ errors and be able to correct those,” Sacks said.
It’s the latest setback in the launch of the new FAFSA form, which has been rocked by frustrating delays and technical problems stemming from the rollout of a redesigned process intended to ask fewer questions and include more automated features.
Parents and students across the nation have reported trouble completing the application, resulting in frustrations that have discouraged many from completing the process. Many colleges, in turn, have been delayed in assessing and completing financial aid packages.
Sacks said there are a number of errors with students applying for financial aid with community colleges.
“One of the things we consistently see with our students is that community college students are selected by the federal government a lot more often than four-year students to verify their income, so they get caught up in income verification,” she said.
In April, Gov. Jim Justice declared an emergency over the problems with FAFSA and described a 40% decline in FAFSA completion for West Virginia high school students.
Since then, state higher education officials have been encouraging students to continue applying for financial aid through FAFSA if they haven’t already.
Students who apply and qualify for West Virginia’s Promise scholarship by Sept. 1 will receive an award of up to $5,500 for the coming academic year. If a student completed last year’s FAFSA and qualifies for the need-based higher education grant, they will receive the award of up to $3,400 for the fall semester.
Sacks said they’ve been seeing a positive trend in student enrollment despite ongoing issues with the FAFSA.
“The trend that we saw a couple months ago when we were all together was that our transfers in high school students were where we were seeing growth and that still holds true,” she said.
BridgeValley has been holding FAFSA Fridays to help students fill out their forms. Sacks said they want to educate students and their families about the new process.
“We want it to be a service to the community because we see that West Virginia wide, while our enrollment is a little bit up, everyone else’s is not. Anything we can do to help our community to make sure that students can at least understand here’s where the hang up is or there’s something wrong with the IRS verification,” she said.
The state Legislature earlier this year approved more than $51 million dollars to support financial aid for students in response to problems with the FAFSA.