CSB+SJU responds to FAFSA delays

During last week’s accepted student reception at the Best Buy headquarters in the Twin Cities, families, prospective students and even CSB+SJU staff were in the dark about one key thing: the cost of attending CSB+SJU.

As the Department of Education continues to delay the release of Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) information to colleges and universities across the country, CSB+SJU financial aid and admissions are attempting to give future students as much information as they can.

CSB+SJU dean of admission Cory Piper told guests at the event that they could soon request an estimated financial aid package based on their Student Aid Index (SAI) from CSB+SJU.

“You could just hear the whole audience, 400 people, sigh in relief,” Piper said. “No one expected or wants to be in this position right now. It is always our intent to get financial aid offers out as swiftly as possible into the hands of our prospective students.”

An email announcing that families could now request estimated financial aid amounts went out on Monday. According to Piper, 44 prospective students had responded asking for information by Tuesday afternoon. It’s the closest thing to official financial aid information CSB+SJU has been able to share with its nearly 2,800 accepted students after the Education Department found errors in the revamped FAFSA form in January.

Piper said CSB+SJU is one of the first schools in Minnesota to send estimated packages to students based on SAI, which does not provide as complete of a financial picture as the FAFSA. CSB+SJU has alsopushed its refundable deposit deadline to June 1 from the standard deadline of May 1.

She did not disclose CSB+SJU’s current enrollment numbers, but she did say both applications and acceptances were up from last year.

“Everything’s trending exactly where we’d like it to be,” Piper said. “That being said, we cannot discredit or discount the importance of the affordability question. Students might have all the intention in the world of coming to St. Ben’s and St. John’s, but the affordability has to go along with it. That’s a reality.”

In a typical year, prospective students could start filling out and submitting the FAFSA on Oct. 1. CSB+SJU financial aid staff would then be able to process that information and send financial aid offers to incoming students sometime in December before Christmas.

This year, however, has been much different. In an attempt to simplify the FAFSA process for students and families, the Education Department made wholesale changes to the form. Two of the more prominent changes included shortening the form from over 100 questions to around 40 and allowing parents without a Social Security Number (SSN) to create a Federal Student Aid (FSA) ID and file the FAFSA.

In doing this, the opening of the FAFSA form for prospective students and families was delayed to Dec. 30, three months after the normal release date. On top of this, the Department of Education discovered a mistake in the form that was overestimating families’ real income.

The delay has led some current CSB+SJU students to consider what they would do if they were deciding on a college during this cycle.

“Not knowing definitely would’ve affected my decision,” SJU sophomore Cormac O’Connor said. “I would have been nervous to go to any college.”

Initially, the Education Department said schools would receive FAFSA information in late January. The mistake led the department to announce on Jan. 30 that this distribution date would be further delayed to sometime in the first half of March. If that date holds, colleges across the country will receive FAFSA information nearly five-and-a-half months later than usual.

“It’s daunting,” said Robert Piechota, CSB+SJU’s executive director of financial aid. “Every school’s kind of in the same boat. We’re all kind of like, ‘Are you kidding? What else are you going to throw at us?’”

Piper said that CSB+SJU plans to distribute financial aid offers to prospective students by early April. With the delay, the financial aid office will be forced to tackle all financial aid offers at once, rather than their typical process of assessing applications as they come in after the initial wave in the fall.

“We’re hoping we can get through them fairly quick, but again it’s kind of unprecedented,” Piechota said. “We’re doing all we can; we’re hoping for the best. But again, the Department of Education has not really given us anything that we feel overly confident with.”

Along with income miscalculation, the new FAFSA form is preventing parents without an SSN from creating an FSA ID and logging in, which was supposed to be a new feature of the relaunched document.

This is particularly challenging for underrepresented students, whose parents may be immigrants or don’t speak English.

“Now you have this person who is supposed to be given a chance to fill out the FAFSA with the new process but can’t do it all,” said Emily Mosolf, a CSB+SJU student loan and financial aid officer. “Once it’s fixed, it’ll be great, but right now they literally cannot complete the FAFSA.”

Piper said the school is communicating what they can with families with this problem. However, the Education Department has not shared a solution with schools.

On Monday, the Education Department announced it would be implementing a “FAFSA College Support Strategy” that would, in part, send financial aid experts to schools across the country to help process FAFSA requests. Piechota said he does not anticipate CSB+SJU will receive assistance from this plan, as it is primarily intended for Historically Black Colleges and Universities and schools with less resources.

Another component of these issues is that returning students may experience a delay in receiving their financial aid packages. Piechota said that the financial aid office usually turns its focus to returning students in March and April, with financial aid packages released sometime in early June.

Now, with much of the work for future students taking up that time, returning students may also experience delays. Piechota said that if the financial aid office cannot send out packages as normal, the goal is to distribute packages before the first billing statement goes out to students in early July.

Amid all the uncertainty, Mosolf has found a silver lining: an emphasis on the importance of a smooth financial aid process.

“The one nice thing, though, is just giving more attention to what schools do,” Mosolf said. “It’s not just ‘Oh, I submitted a FAFSA,’ and 24 hours later I’m going to get a financial aid offer. It shows, ‘Hey, we’re all in the same boat.’”