College applicants with immigrant parents caught in chaos of college admissions

The college admissions students brings perennial stress to high school seniors and their families. This year a snag with financial aid forms caused additional chaos and put families in the difficult position of needing to commit to attending schools without full information about the price tag for tuition, which is easily $50,000 / year at private schools.

A particular difficulty arose for student applicants from mixed status families, where US-born children have immigrant parents lacking a social security. The Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form is used by many schools to calculate eligibility for student loans and school-sponsored or private aid that makes up the tuition difference. The new online portal for FAFSA did not allow for submissions without signatures from a parent with a social security number. (In the past, signature forms could be mailed in after completing the rest of the form online.) Advocacy groups estimate that a half-million U.S. citizen students wit hundocumented parents are applying and could be megatively impacted.

The Education Department provided a nine-step workaround for the signature requirement alongside student eligibility requirements, but the new procedure would override paper applications already submitted and replace the earlier recorded date of submission.

The Wall Street Journal shares a story of Emannuel, a 17-year old student from Denver whose parents immigrated from Mexico in the 1990s and lack this information. In the story, Emannuel lamented that the delay updating his forms could mean that his state scholarship applications, that rely on FAFSA information even without funding, could be harmed by late processing.

MHC