This year’s college financial aid process was drastically changed to make it easier. However, several students struggled to fill out their application due to more internal issues.
To apply for federal student aid, students fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form, and it goes to financial aid for processing. While Student Accounts is responsible for putting charges onto accounts, financial aid is responsible for aid eligibility, scholarships, and grants.
Financial aid receives files from the state for students who qualify for the HOPE and Zell Miller scholarships so they can input them into the system. In addition to state scholarship information, they receive a list of students eligible for institutional scholarships from the scholarship committee. After they receive this information, they can apply it to students’ accounts.
When Congress passed the FAFSA Simplification Act, the entire system surrounding the application was changed. According to the Federal Student Aid website, the act caused four main changes, including: replacing the Expected Family Contribution (EFC) with Student Aid Index (SAI), modifying the family definitions in FAFSA formulas, expanding access to Pell Grants, and streamlining the FAFSA form.
Before the 2024-25 award year, FAFSA used the EFC to calculate aid, meaning that, if a parent had more than one child in college, students would receive more aid because the expected contribution was divided between the children. Now, the amount depends only on the individual student’s aid.
FAFSA also made modifications to family definitions in its formulas, changing which parent students will report tax returns for and the family size. For example, for divorced parents, instead of reporting income for the parent the student lives with, the student will report the parent that makes the most financial contribution to the student.
The Federal Student Aid website claims that the new FAFSA expands access to Federal Pell Grants because the FAFSA Simplification Act expands access to more students; incarcerated students now can receive the grant, and “Federal Pell Grant lifetime eligibility will be restored to students whose school closed while they were enrolled or if the school is found to have misled the student.”
Brenda Taylor-Hickey, director of financial aid at ABAC, said, “New to this year, Pell pays per credit hour, so if a student drops from 11 to ten hours even now, that affects your financial aid as a Pell recipient. So, it’s important to have your schedule locked in and not make a lot of changes to it.”
Now, FAFSA uses data directly from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to calculate Pell Grant eligibility. The Federal Student Aid describes this as “streamlining the FAFSA Form.” However, this is the exact opposite of what most students experienced with the FAFSA this academic year.
A second-year biology student said, “They [FAFSA] didn’t give me my full HOPE amount until two weeks after class started, so my schedule got dropped twice during the process because my scholarship couldn’t cover my tuition.”
Although students had issues with the application, it was not a one-sided problem. Financial aid offices nationwide had difficulties processing FAFSAs.
“This year, financial aid offices had a lot of things thrown at them that we weren’t expecting,” Taylor-Hickey said. “We had a system that came to us broken and still has issues with it. So, it’s not necessarily the people in the office that is where the anger needs to be directed because we’re doing the best we can to get the aid out there as quickly as we can.”
“We’re already releasing things about the 2025-26 FAFSA,” she continued, “so we’re staying on top of all of it and doing everything we can to make sure that things are back to normal this year, as far as processing is concerned.”
For the 2025-26 FAFSA, financial aid plans to host FAFSA workshops on campus to encourage students to turn it in on time. In addition, they will continue to host FAFSA Fridays, where students can come in from eight to noon on Fridays and get assistance from staff in filling out their FAFSA applications.
“I’m doing everything I can to take care of the students because that’s what’s important, it’s getting the funding to you guys as quickly as possible, so you can be successful in your classes,” Taylor-Hickey said.
To contact financial aid, email finaid@abac.edu to address any questions concerning federal, state, or institutional aid.