This time of year is busy every year as I join many colleagues in Virginia and beyond to advocate for issues of critical importance in private higher education. One of the most crucial issues is college affordability, as many students are struggling to decide which school is the right fit for both their goals and their budget. This is especially true for students from middle- and low-income families, for whom a college education can seem unattainable without having access to significant financial aid.
Unfortunately, several avenues to obtain this much-needed financial aid are becoming harder for applicants to navigate.
One major complication is the disastrous overhaul of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form, which provides the foundation for our nation’s college financial aid system. Due to an astounding number of programming errors, miscalculations and inefficiencies, this year’s FAFSA process has been seriously burdened by delays. Typically, colleges start accepting and supporting their next academic year of students with financial aid packages as early as the preceding October. But this year, colleges won’t even have the data they need to make their financial aid determinations until mid-March, which leaves applicants very little time to weigh their options and decide on the right school for their needs.
In addition to the FAFSA delays, some legislators have targeted key sources of college financial aid for reduction or elimination, including Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants and Federal Work-Study programs, which provide nearly $2 billion in tuition assistance for more than 2 million recipients nationwide, including more than 66,000 students in Virginia.
As a higher education institution that champions access and affordability, Virginia Wesleyan University knows these financial aid programs are critically important as 43% of our students are from underrepresented populations. At a time when struggling families are increasingly relying on federal aid to help their children obtain a college education, we believe that these programs should be expanded, not reduced. For many years, my colleagues and I have campaigned to double the Pell Grant maximum to $13,000 in order to keep up with nationwide inflation. Likewise, the Virginia Tuition Assistance Grant, while a wonderful program, lacks modernity, offering a paper-based application process only. This inefficiency inherently limits access, increases the likelihood of errors and requires more work hours to process.
For a generation of students who have grown up in an era where everything from their car to their refrigerator is “smart,” few of these financial aid solutions feel very smart, and our nation’s students deserve better. They deserve a financial aid system they can easily navigate, depend on for accuracy and receive a timely response.
With millions of aspiring college students across the U.S. currently unsure of how much financial aid they’ll be receiving, this uncertainty will directly impact their choice of higher education. While I can’t fault any student for making a rational economic decision based on limited available data, I would nonetheless encourage any family considering this decision to do something that the FAFSA programmers didn’t: Think ahead.
Your choice of college is ultimately about finding the best fit for your future. Finances are part of that equation, but so is the quality of education, the depth of expertise, the tone of campus culture, the core values of the institution, and the geographic, economic and networking opportunities the school provides. Ensuring that you’re in the best place for you can be a hard decision to make, but it is always one worth making with your long-term goals in mind.
Let’s hope today’s students are able to employ the kind of decision-making foresight they expect from the institutions they depend on, and that our financial aid system will be better able to deliver the kind of responsible and reliable support that our students deserve.
Scott D. Miller, Ph.D., is president of Virginia Wesleyan University in Virginia Beach.