News in Brief

Dissecting the FASFA Debacle

“An enrollment nightmare.” “A disaster.” “Botched.” “A mess all around.”

These are just a few ways that media outlets, policy experts, and the public have characterized one of the biggest news stories in recent months: the introduction of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. The so-called Better FAFSA was supposed to streamline the process of applying for aid for students and families. Yet its rollout has “upended the college admission season,” as the Washington Post put it.¹

In interviews with the Post, as well as other news outlets, financial aid officers and presidents cited numerous errors in the processed aid applications they’ve received from the U.S. Department of Education. In many cases, the forms have had the wrong codes or incorrect or incomplete Internal Revenue Service data, or had miscalculated students’ eligibility for federal aid, among other issues.

The rollout got off to a rocky start when the Department of Education missed the online launch deadline by more than three months—from October to January—and then users experienced multiple glitches, including being totally locked out. “The Department of Education reported ‘extraordinary wait times’ as its helpline was clogged with calls,” according to the Atlantic.²

The problems have had significant repercussions, as financial aid is a major factor in many students’ decisions about enrolling in college. As many as 72 percent of undergraduates received some form of aid in 2020, the Boston Globe reported, including 81 percent of Black students and 72 percent of Latino students.³ “The students who are coming from backgrounds that have more obstacles to overcome—those students have really struggled and feel very frustrated and broken by this year’s financial aid process,” the Globe quoted Jade Franco, program officer for the Boston Foundation’s Pathways to Postsecondary Success.⁴

As deadlines for student acceptances have loomed, colleges have felt negative impacts, as well. The delays coupled with questions about the integrity of the data have led campus officials “to question whether they can send financial aid offers to accepted applicants before some or all of the known problems are fixed,” reported the Chronicle of Higher Education. They have also “intensified the pressure on campus decision makers, especially at tuition-dependent institutions,” it said, because fewer high school seniors have submitted a FASFA this year.⁵

In fact, as many as 2.6 million fewer had submitted by March compared to the same time last year, according to the Atlantic. And the decline in high school applications was “disproportionally clustered among schools with high shares of low-income students, the exact people who are least likely to go college without financial aid,” it said. Asserting that “the effect on college attendance threatens to be even worse than the coronavirus was,” the publication also noted Fitch Ratings’ warning that “with declining enrollment, small colleges with high rates of low-income or minority students could fall into financial peril.”⁶

Questions remain as to what went wrong, why, and who’s to blame. Some experts blame Congress for not providing the funds needed for the conversion to succeed. Others fault the Education Department for trying to do too much too soon. “They changed everything from the process to the form itself to the formula for determining students aid, and they changed it all at once,” Catherine Brown, head of policy and advocacy at the National College Attainment Network, told the Atlantic. “The FAFSA rollout is a story either of insufficient investment in the public sector or of government overreach and incompetence,” the Atlantic summed up the arguments. “Both accounts could have some truth to them.”⁷

Although the Department of Education is working to rectify the FAFSA problems, it was announced on April 26, 2024, that the chief operating officer of the Office of Federal Student Aid, Richard Cordray, is leaving his post at the end of June.

“In the long run, nearly everyone seems to believe that the new FAFSA will be better,” the Atlantic concluded. It noted that experts thought the new form will ultimately lead to low-income students getting more aid and greater number of students being eligible for grants “and might even be worth the cascade of delays and errors. But we just might sacrifice the class of 2028 to get there.”⁸

Public Views Conflict on Freedom of Speech

A recent survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights (FIRE) and the Polarization Research Lab at Dartmouth College has found that as many as 69 percent of Americans say they believe things are heading in the wrong direction when asked if they are able to freely express their views. Views split along partisan lines, with nearly half of Democrats saying that free speech rights are going in the right direction versus just 26 percent of Republicans.¹

Some of the results of the survey are particularly relevant to higher education. After being asked to select what they thought was the most offensive idea from a list, almost 70 percent of those polled said that their local college shouldn’t allow a faculty member who espoused that belief to teach classes. A little more than half (52 percent) said they “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed allowing the person to give a public speech in their community. Yet 59 percent said public libraries shouldn’t remove books that espoused the belief they found most offensive, and 72 percent said someone who voices the belief they found most offensive shouldn’t lose their job.²

Earlier in the academic year, a survey of American adults by the University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research explored in more depth people’s views about how and when speech should be restricted on campuses. Again, as various media outlets observed, respondents gave seemingly rather contradictory answers.³

Just 30 percent said states should be able to restrict what professors at state universities teach, although support was somewhat higher among Republicans. Also, when asked about the key purposes of higher education, as many as 90 percent said either a major or minor purpose should be “to support the free exchange and debate of different ideas and values.” At the same time, however, 55 percent said students shouldn’t be permitted to invite speakers to campus who’ve made offensive comments, and half the students said professors shouldn’t be allowed to teach a curriculum that includes polarizing ideas.⁴

In addition, a significant majority said professors shouldn’t be allowed to express sexist views (80 percent), racist views (81 percent), or anti-LGBTQ views (74 percent), while many also said they should not be permitted to promote the views of a specific political group or religion (69 percent for each).⁵

Asked by Inside Higher Ed for his views on the results, Sean Stevens, director of polling and analysis at FIRE, said that while those who responded didn’t seem to applaud the idea of administrators curbing faculty speech, “they still kind of want it restricted somehow, and I’m not sure whom they would want doing that.”⁶

A Think Tank for Higher Education Workers

Since the pandemic, college-educated workers “seem to be driving a spike in unionization in industries across the country,” the New York Times has observed.¹ So it’s perhaps to be expected that, in the past year, union efforts have been proliferating at colleges and universities themselves, as well.

As the Chronicle of Higher Education reported, unions represented undergraduate workers at only two colleges before 2022.² In the past 18 months, however, the movement of those workers to unionize has accelerated. Unions have formed at several major universities, notably the California State University System and the University of Oregon, plus at least seven other colleges since October 2023.³

Undergrads have been following the lead of graduate students, postdocs, and researchers, who established 26 new bargaining units in 2023 alone, according to data Inside Higher Ed reported from the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions.⁴ And all that has occurred on top of continuing unionization drives among faculty members.

In most instances, unions for higher education workers have been splintered into those for specific types of workers. Moreover, about 20 states don’t offer collective bargaining rights to workers at public institutions, and the others that do still don’t allow collective bargaining by all employees. Employees at private institutions—except tenured and tenure-track faculty members, for the most part—are allowed by federal law to unionize, yet even those who belong to unions under the national AFL-CIO are split among different units according to how their jobs are classified.

But an emerging organization intends to change all that. Higher Ed Labor United, or HELU, aims to create “a national coalition of all types of higher education workers—regardless of which union they’re in or whether they’re in any union, and regardless of their job title,” Inside Higher Ed has reported.⁵ HELU plans to be “a think tank for higher education labor and a vehicle for informing and supporting workers across unions and universities to help them organize, bargain, and take other action.”⁶

Joe Berry, a labor historian, founder of the Chicago Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, and member of HELU’s interim steering committee, told the news outlet that he believes an ongoing national coalition is needed because the numerous unions “don’t talk to each other for the most part; they don’t speak with one voice on behalf of higher education labor.”⁷ Given higher education’s economic importance and the large number of workers in it, “Higher ed labor has punched below its weight,” he added, “because it’s been so divided in many ways.”⁸

More than 100 local unions have endorsed HELU’s statement, and the organization is holding a founding convention at Rutgers University in May where, according to Todd Wolfson, president of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT (American Association of University Professors-American Federation of Teachers) it will move from an “informal network” to a “more formalized structure.”⁹

College Students on the Move

The number of students transferring from one college to another is on the rise, according to a report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, which found that transfers had increased 5.3 percent in fall 2023 over the previous year. And as reported by Higher Ed Dive and other news outlets, the largest jumps were among traditionally underserved groups, including Black students (7.8 percent) and Hispanic students (5 percent). The number of rural students transferring from community colleges to four-year institutions also significantly increased—by more than 12 percent—and transfers by students from the lowest three income quartiles rose, as well.¹

As Michael T. Nietzel, former president of Missouri State University, described in a Forbes article, that students can transfer three ways and “every type of transfer saw gains.” Transfers increased significantly among students making reverse transfers, or from a four-year college to two-year college, and among those making lateral transfers, or between either two-year or four-year colleges.²

But the greatest gain occurred in upward transfers—or students who move from a two year to a four-year institution—which increased 7.7 percent even as community college enrollment held steady. The highest rates of growth occurred at private four-year colleges and universities, including highly selective ones, which enrolled 13 percent more low-income and middle-income students from community colleges.

Some of the people interviewed highlighted this as good news, as the data has also shown that almost 69 percent of students who began at a community college and transferred to a four-year institution in fall 2013, 2015, and 2016 remained in college and gained a credential within six years, according to Inside Higher Ed. Yet the optimism should be “tempered,” the publication warned, noting that “transfer experts and researchers emphasized that those successes need to be considered against the backdrop of severe pandemic enrollment losses and a transfer system that’s been faulty for decades.”³

Although 80 percent of community college students hope to obtain a bachelor’s degree, only 16 percent receive one within six years—a figure that hasn’t budged much in more than a decade—Eileen L. Strempel, professor and dean at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Stephen J. Handel, strategy director for postsecondary education transformation at ECMC Foundation, wrote in a separate opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed. Exploring the reasons why, they cited the complexity of the system and the fact individual institutions often treat the transfer process differently, “whether through a unique set of admissions requirements, nuanced acceptance practices, or specific enrollment prerequisites.”⁴

Strempel and Handel acknowledged that, in recent years, at least 36 states have put statewide transfer policies in place, and more individual colleges and universities are offering greater support for transfer students by building transfer student centers and on-campus housing. They’ve also developed common course numbers, guided pathways, better articulations agreements and improved transfer orientations if efforts to create “transfer-affirming campus environments.”⁵

Yet the authors and other experts think much more should be done. “I think we are seeing trends move in a direction that we want to see, both from the perspective of what we need for our larger economy and also what we need from an institutional perspective.” Juana Sanchez, director of Beyond Transfer Policy Advisory Board, commented to Inside Higher Ed about the research center’s findings. “But I still have questions of how our institutions may be shifting some of their day-to-day practices and policies to really embrace these students and help them reach completion in an efficient manner.”⁶