Northern Kentucky University financial aid teams breathed a sigh of relief last week as they stuffed financial aid packages into envelopes for incoming freshmen.
“It is definitely a huge relief for our families and our students. It’s also a relief in terms of the team that has worked extremely hard to ensure we are accurate with our award packages and ensuring that our communication is (successful),” NKU Assistant Vice President for Enrollment and Financial Assistance Leah Stewart told LINK nky.
In a typical year, the packages would have been mailed out earlier, with a May 1 deadline for acceptance. The deadline this year is June 1. Federal changes to the 2024-25 FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid, required under a 2020 federal law is the reason for the delay.
The federal application found here does not officially close until June 2025, but many scholarship deadlines are much earlier, making federal delays troublesome for institutions and students near and far. First came a nearly three-month lag in opening the FAFSA application process last year. That was followed by technological slowdowns and problems tied to federal reporting of student and family data to colleges and universities.
“When they started sending those (reports) out, immediately after, we identified that there were problems with that output. The calculations were not right. Some of the data didn’t pull in correctly from the IRS. So there were a lot of problems,” Stewart told LINK. Numerous applications had to be reprocessed.
“We’ve extended deadlines because families need to make decisions but they need to know how much they’re going to get,” she said. Over 1,700 NKU students have received awards so far, she said, with more offers sent out on a rolling basis.
Roughly 74% of NKU’s approximate annual enrollment of 15,000 relies on some form of financial aid like federal Pell (need-based) grants, federal loans, or other sources, said Stewart. State need-based College Access Program grants are also tied to FAFSA.
“It’s a big deal,” she said.
Kentucky’s community and technical college system—which includes Gateway—has also been impacted by the delays. The 16-college system reported that it usually has FAFSA data in hand by late March for 35,000 students, many of whom are Pell-eligible or have “exceptional financial need.” However, this year only one-fifth of that data was received on time.
“With stats like this, you can understand the potential impact this disruptive rollout may have on our colleges and current and future students,” KCTCS president Ryan Quarles said as he announced the creation of a FAFSA Rapid Response Task Force for KCTCS in April. Providing students with estimated financial aid notifications and implementing a FAFSA communication plan are two task force goals.
Not knowing what aid they will receive or when could “lead some (students) to delay or forgo college, negatively impacting their lifetime potential,” according to a KCTCS press release.
“While KCTCS cannot control the federal financial aid process, we are actively doing all we can to make it understandable and accessible to our students in a timely manner,” Quarles said.
A request for comment from Gateway about how FAFSA is directly impacting their students had not been received at the time this story was published, although the college has a website dedicated to the financial aid process.
Thomas More University financial aid director Mark Messingschlager told LINK that his university, like other schools, pushed back its enrollment decision deadline past May 1 due to FAFSA delays. The school is now almost caught up in getting financial aid offers out to students and families.
“As soon as we started receiving FAFSA data in mid-March, we started processing offers. Being a smaller school, we were able to be more nimble with all of the complications from the federal government, even calculating some formulas on each FAFSA by hand so we could keep the process moving. We were able to get offers out on the same day that we started receiving FAFSA data. However, much of the FAFSA data we were receiving still had errors from the federal processing system, so we had to hold back many offers” but are now close to completion, Messingschlager told LINK.
Not that it’s been easy, especially for students and families who have faced “a constrained timeline for making such a significant decision,” he said. The good news, he explained, is the FAFSA changes expanded eligibility for students along the way.
“Overall, the updates to the FAFSA were implemented to expand eligibility for federal and state grants, so students should take advantage of this free application to see what they might be eligible to receive,” Messingschlager told LINK.
It remains to be seen whether or how much FAFSA delays affect college and university enrollment in NKY.
According to a Feb. 5 story in Inside Higher Ed, colleges and universities in other parts of the country that pushed back their deadlines are focused mostly on “easing the process for students—especially those from underserved communities who rely on FAFSA information to make crucial decisions.”
It was in February when NKU bumped its freshmen acceptance deadline for freshman merit scholarship awards from May 1 to June 1. The decision came “in response to the delays universities across the country are experiencing as the federal government navigates the changes implemented to the free application for Federal Student Aid, also known commonly as FAFSA,” NKU announced.
When asked last week if she expects FAFSA delays to impact NKU enrollment, Stewart said “I think it’s too soon to tell.”
“We’re doing everything in our power to assist students through the process, to explain what the process is. And while we’re doing that hopefully we won’t have issues with enrollment,” she told LINK.
Answers about FAFSA can be found at colleges or universities or official websites like this one managed by the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education. FAFSA information is also available through the Kentucky Higher Education Assistance Authority, which has a website and a call center and outreach text line. That number is 800-928-8926.