The Brief

Millions of people each year fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) in hopes of receiving money to pay for college. The majority of students enrolled at many California universities receive financial aid, which is often the key to unlocking a person’s path to a college degree.

A significant number of those students live in families in which a member is not authorized to live in the United States. Amid ongoing problems with a revised FAFSA process, these applicants continue to have problems filling out the application.

“Our main concern was our students from mixed-status families,” said Shelveen Ratnam, spokesperson for the California Student Aid Commission.

The commission oversees a program that sets aside billions of dollars in financial aid that’s given out to applicants who first fill out the FAFSA form.

Typically, an applicant in a mixed status household is a U.S. citizen, but one or both parents or caretakers are in the U.S. without proper authorization. That means there is no Social Security number to enter in the application.

How many students are affected?

It’s hard to say exactly how many California applicants live in mixed-status families, Ratnam said, but research suggests it’s about 12% of the applicant pool. Commission staff are working with financial aid counselors at universities and high school college advisors to help students fill out the forms and stay patient with the process.

The FAFSA application has methods to verify a parent’s identity outside of a Social Security Number — such as a state issued identification — but the glitches in that process are keeping applicants from finishing and submitting the application.

“That’s still something we’re concerned about, and we’re in communication with top officials with the U.S. Department of Education and then officials with the CSU and UC,” Ratnam said.

Name glitches

College advisors also report that the FAFSA application doesn’t appear to be designed to handle long Spanish surnames, especially ones with hyphens.

“The workaround that we've figured out with this is that we need to type in up to 16 characters of that last name, [and] leave it cut off,” said Sebastian Ramirez. He’s a college application advisor working with students at Cabrillo High School in Long Beach.

College advisor Allegra Gutierrez leads a presentation about the federal financial aid form.

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Courtesy Allegra Gutierrez

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The FAFSA problems over the last six months have been extra stressful for students, he said — they’re also juggling tests in Advanced Placement classes and the long list of senior activities as they end their public school careers.

“They see no progress… I've had a few students that have told me they want to give up,” he said.

But Ramirez continues to call the students in to work on their applications, sharing updates on the fixes, and telling them they’ll be able to see their college futures more clearly once they send in their request for financial aid.

“Luckily a few of the students in the past weeks they’ve been able to submit [their applications]," he said. "The morale is slowly increasing.”