Eric Zuniga, Campus Carrier deputy news editor
With results of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) delayed, the Admission Office is planning to issue official financial aid offers to new students using an estimator on the Department of Education’s website.
The Department of Education soft launched an overhauled FAFSA with fewer questions and new aid eligibility requirements last December. But the new form’s launch has been hampered by technical issues. The Department of Education recently announcing that colleges would not receive student’s results until March because the department failed to adjust for inflation in the new Student Aid Index (SAI) formula.
The delay has meant that Berry’s financial aid office, which typically sends its first aid offers to new students in December, has not issued any aid packages. Vice President of Enrollment Management Andrew Bressette said Berry wants to reduce uncertainty for prospective students.
“We know that understanding cost and value is really important in the college search process,” Bressette said.
The estimator tool asks for information about household size, parental marital status, income and savings, producing an approximation of the SAI number that indicates a student’s level of financial need. The Office of Admission is asking prospective families to submit this estimate to a form on the online portal for admitted students.
According to Bressette, the estimator should produce similar results to the official FAFSA for most students.
“If you own a business or you own a farm or you have a parent who’s just retired or is about to retire, the estimator is not quite going to be as accurate,” Bressette said. “But for most of our students, it should be pretty close.”
While all students are still required to submit the FAFSA, the admission office will be using the estimator to prepare full aid offers for prospective students. Berry is promising to guarantee the aid in these preliminary offers if they do not exceed a student’s final offer, based on the results of their FAFSA, by more than $1,000.
“In some cases, your official award means we need to give you more aid [than the early offer],” Bressette said. “In some cases, we may have overestimated your aid. If that’s the case, I’m going to say, is your SAI within a thousand? If so, we’re going to keep that same package.”
Bressette said that students whose preliminary offers are over $1,000 more than their final offer will have their situations evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
As of last week, 600 families had used the estimator, a number Bressette hopes to increase.
“I’d love to see at least half of our admitted students [use the tool], so you’d be talking about almost 2,000 families,” Bressette said.
Bressette said that Berry’s decision to offer preliminary aid offers fits within its commitment to be transparent about the college’s cost with prospective families. He feels that this may put Berry at a competitive advantage compared to other colleges, many of which are simply delaying deposit deadlines.
“It’s just saying, how can we continue to do this great thing that families need and appreciate in this moment when we’re all trying to figure out how this is going to work,” Bressette said.
Berry’s decision to guarantee offers before receiving official FAFSA results puts the college at risk of awarding more aid than it had previously budgeted for. However, the financial consequences of admitting a smaller class than projected are greater, according to Bressette.
“Under-enrolling is a budget deficit you live with for four years,” Bressette said.
According to Bressette, Berry’s admission numbers are on track for this point in the year. The college has admitted more applicants now than at this point last year, and the number of students making deposits is close to the average for the past three years. But lower-income families tend to be the last to make college decisions, which makes early aid offers especially important.
“While our trajectory looks good, we run the risk of not getting there if we’re not attentive to those for whom aid is really going to be the deciding factor,” Bressette said.
Sophomore Bonner scholar Monserrat Alvarez is one student for whom an early aid offer was important. When she first applied to Berry, she received early confirmation that a signature scholarship would cover her expenses.
“That was honestly what solidified my decision to come to Berry, just knowing the amount of money they were going to help me out with—I didn’t have to worry about being in debt,” Alvarez said.
Though she received an early aid offer, filling out the FAFSA for the first time was a challenge for Alvarez as a first-generation college student.
“Both of my parents did not go to college, so they never had to fill out the FAFSA,” Alvarez said. “It was really just me just figuring it out on my own and talking to some of my friends to see how they were doing it. I didn’t have that support system to help me figure out.”
Alvarez faced little difficulty filling out the new FAFSA this year, but she noted that many cannot submit the form because their parents do not have Social Security numbers, a known issue.
“I know for sure my other friends have struggled a lot,” Alvarez said. “They can’t even submit it.”
The delayed and mismanaged FAFSA launch may disproportionately hurt those already underrepresented at colleges, according to Bressette.
“My worry is that those students that need the aid the most are probably the ones least likely to get the FAFSA done,” Bressette said.
Bressette said that Berry is ultimately aiming to minimize these inequities.
“That anxiety around affordability could drive families to look at other choices or make different choices or just say college is out of the question,” Bressette said. “That’s really what we’re trying to prevent as much as possible.”
While new students will receive early aid offers with the estimator tool, the financial aid timeline for returning students remains unchanged. Students who have questions about their aid situation are encouraged to visit the Financial Aid Office, available Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.