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  • California’s universities navigate unprecedented FAFSA mistakes and delays 

    California’s universities navigate unprecedented FAFSA mistakes and delays 


    The Student Services Center at Chico State.

    Credit: Jason Halley / Chico State

    This story was updated on 4/16 to include the latest information on California’s drop in completed FAFSA applications.

    Unprecedented difficulties in students applying for federal financial aid have wreaked havoc among financial aid and admissions officers across California’s colleges and universities, who are facing longer hours and more stress, sometimes while short on staff.

    Since its initial delay last year from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31, the U.S. Department of Education’s rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form has been challenging and frustrating for students, their families and the college campuses they seek to attend. For many students, financial aid plays a significant role in deciding where and if they will go to college. 

    And the resulting delays have pushed back students’ decisions.

    Kamila Juarez, a senior at Grace Davis High in Modesto, has been accepted to all the universities she’s applied to including Cal Poly SLO, UC Davis, UCLA and UC San Diego, but she hasn’t decided where she will go because financial aid is the biggest influence on her decision. And Juarez hasn’t heard anything yet about how much she will receive, which has created a frustrating situation. 

    “It’s kind of stressful,” she said, adding that if money were not an option her first choice would be Cal Poly followed by UCLA. “When I do know how much I get, I know I’ll have to decide pretty fast.”

    Both UC and CSU systems extended the deadline for Intent to Register for fall 2024 to no earlier than May 15. A host of other Cal State campuses extended it further to June 1 because of the delays. 

    Harder hit than other states

    California, in particular, has been hard hit in the FAFSA debacle because of the large number of “mixed-status” families, or U.S. citizens who have at least one parent without a Social Security number. Many of those students have been unable to submit a FAFSA. Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom, the California Student Aid Commission and the UC and Cal State systems agreed that students could submit a California Dream Act application in place of the FAFSA so they could at least receive priority access to state financial aid. The Dream Act is typically only available to undocumented students.

    “We do hope to get offers out (soon). It still feels like there is an equity issue between being able to send out financial aid offers that have zero problems to not being able to provide financial aid offers to students that fit in these other scenarios,” said Becki Sanchez, director of financial aid at UC Irvine. “In a sense, it makes us feel very uneasy.” 

    The situation doesn’t seem to be improving.

    “It has been very scary, to say the least, trying to keep up with all of these changes and errors and resolutions that don’t make sense from the feds,” said Sonia Jethani, director of financial aid and scholarships at California State University, East Bay. “We’re hanging in there. We have to make sure that we’re on top of it in order to answer the students and provide support to them as much as possible. But I’ve never seen this before.” 

    Financial aid and admissions officers say that in the nearly 40 years that the FAFSA has existed, this year’s problems have been unprecedented.

    Typically, as has been the process for decades, high school seniors and community college transfer students would begin completing the FAFSA in October to meet California’s March priority deadline for access to state aid like the Cal Grant. During that period, those students would submit applications to the colleges and universities that they’re seeking admission to, so they would have their offer letters by early spring. The traditional timing allowed financial aid offices to send details about grants, loans and scholarships to students around March and April, in time for them to make a decision on the college they plan to attend in the fall. 

    But this year’s repeated FAFSA disruptions means colleges haven’t been able to send out aid awards, either because students have had trouble applying, the department has miscalculated some students’ aid, or colleges haven’t received any aid information from the department. Each award letter sent by colleges to their admitted students that complete a financial aid application is customized with a combination of federal, state and institutional, grants, loans and scholarships.

    California extended deadline

    According to the National College Attainment Network’s FAFSA tracker, California is among the states that dropped the most in FAFSA completions compared to last year before the form was revised. As of April 5, completions were down 43.4%.

    California extended its priority FAFSA application deadline to May 2. 

    “We should have had our financial aid packages ready by now,” Jethani said. “We probably won’t be ready to send out aid notifications until the second half of this month.” 

    Financial aid officers at Cal Poly Pomona anticipate that they will start sending award letters to students this week. The campus added workshops, including on Saturdays, to host informational sessions and help students complete the FAFSA. Jeanette Phillips, executive director of financial aid and scholarships for the campus, said they will also do some extra tracking and target their communications to make sure their admitted students completed the FAFSA. 

    “Like many schools. we’re a little short-staffed, but we are doing our very best,” Phillips said, adding that the delays have added work to their normal spring duties like processing summer financial aid, which “is a significantly manual process. … We still have to work with our current students. We have a number of appeals that students have submitted for financial review.” 

    Phillips said normally the financial aid officers would have plenty of time to focus and prioritize, “but now we have to double up, triple up our energy and efforts to try to handle” everything. 

    Because the Pomona campus is fielding more questions and concerns from families this year, Phillips said financial aid officers are spending about an extra 15% of their time meeting with students. 

    The mistakes from the federal department also have financial aid officers adding unique disclosures to the information they give their potential students. The department notified colleges last week that they made mistakes on tax information submitted by students, amounting to about 30% to 40% of unusable files. 

    “We feel like the Department of Education has basically put it on the universities to figure this out for our students,” Sanchez said. “It’s really disappointing, their response to this.” 

    Sanchez said the Irvine campus has about 30% of financial aid offers it can’t send because they need to be reprocessed by the department. 

    Jethani said the East Bay financial aid officers are providing disclosures to students within their financial aid packages that the information they receive is based on information that could change because of the various errors and mistakes from the department. 

    Some of the mistakes are due to the new formula the department is using to determine aid. In the past, the FAFSA used “expected family contribution” to calculate students’ aid, but the new form uses the “student aid index formula.” In March, the department announced a miscalculation of the student aid index, which led to further delays.

    CSU East Bay and some other campus have partnered with third-party vendors to help with their FAFSA “backend processing” like verifying information because they are short on staff, and the East Bay campus anticipates it will also be “triaging” and fielding various questions from students even after the fall term begins, Jethani said.

    During a hearing on the FAFSA debacle on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, gave the department an F grade for its rollout.

    “This really adds up to a crisis of credibility for the Department of Education,” he said. “If there was a financial aid director or even a college president that delayed financial aid on their campus for up to six months, the professional price that would be paid for that would be pretty steep.” 

    And as for those mixed-status students that are now encouraged to fill out the Dream Act application, Sanchez said her office will still try to encourage them to complete the FAFSA. 

    “These are U.S. citizens, and they are entitled to federal student aid such as the Pell Grant and student loans, federal work-study, and all those things that they are not eligible for under the (Dream Act application),” she said. 

    Impact on enrollments

    The ripple effect of this year’s FAFSA delays is expected to significantly affect campuses’ enrollments, especially those that have faced challenges encouraging students to attend. 

    “Universities nationwide are likely seeing enrollment downturns just like East Bay right now,” Jethani said. “We are low in enrollment, and we are low in applications, and we are low on decisions because all of these students are waiting on their financial aid to be able to decide on whether they can afford to come. This is a pretty scary time for everyone.” 

    The universities are facing pressure to maintain or raise their enrollments, but Phillips said California has an additional competitor for students to contend with: an increase in the minimum wage. 

    “The decision that some students are making out of high school is, do I go get that $20 an hour job or do I go to school?” Phillips said. 

    About 70% of Cal Poly Pomona’s students receive some form of financial aid, which means that the delays have made it difficult for the campus to project what the fall enrollment will look like, said Jessica Wagoner, senior associate vice president of enrollment management and services.  

    The UC system, on the other hand, saw record applications this year because of an increase in students who want to transfer, and there are expectations that enrollment will continue to increase across its campuses. But there is still concern that the FAFSA problems will particularly affect low-income and first-generation students.  

    “We’re a very popular campus, so I’m not worried about us making our big numbers,” said Dale Leaman, executive director of undergraduate admissions for UC Irvine. “The thing that concerns me the most is the students who just get so frustrated with the situation that they just give up … especially our first-generation families, where parents have not gone through this.” 

    Sanchez said families have lost a lot of trust in the department because of the poor FAFSA rollout, so the responsibility will fall on universities to rebuild that trust. 

    “My job is to make this successful in spite of things going bad,” she said. “My plan is if the Department of Education isn’t going to pull it together, we are certainly going to make sure that our students are OK, that they’re not harmed, that they start classes on time, that they don’t have to worry about these things.” 

    California Student Journalism Corps member Ashley Bolter contributed to this report.





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  • Trump’s Unprecedented Threat to Take Away Harvard’s Tax-Exempt Status

    Trump’s Unprecedented Threat to Take Away Harvard’s Tax-Exempt Status


    Trump’s war on higher education is similar to his war on every other major institution. He wants everyone to be afraid of him. He wants no critics to escape his wrath. He wants dissident voices silenced. He wants to be our king, our emperor, our dictator.

    He has threatened to punish law firms that have represented his opponents, such as his 2016 challenger Hillary Clinton and Special Counsel Jack Smith, who gathered evidence of Trump’s crimes but was ultimately defeated by Trump’s delaying tactics.

    He has threatened the news media, hitting CBS News “60 Minutes” with a $10 billion lawsuit for editing its interview with Kamala Harris (which is standard practice) and suing ABC News for a remark by George Stephanopoulos that he didn’t like. Both of these are frivolous lawsuits, but CBS is negotiating a settlement and ABC paid out $15 million to end the lawsuit. In a pre-emptive conciliatory move, Amazon (Jeff Bezos) bought the rights to a documentary about Melania Trump for $40 million, which will be produced by Melania. Bezos owns The Washington Post, where he has told the editorial board to go easy on Trump. The Post lost some of its best journalists after Bezos groveled to Trump.

    He has threatened to cut off federal funding to universities if they don’t meet his demands. The ostensible reason for targeting universities is to compel them to combat anti-Semitism on their campuses, but it’s hard to credit Trump’s sincerity. He has defended anti-Semites, dined with them, and received their support. His best friend Elon Musk supported Germany’s far-right AfD party in the recent elections. A man who cares so little about civil rights, who attacks academic freedom, who defunds education and social services, who belittles minorities, who threatens democracy, and who is so utterly lacking in compassion–is no friend of Jews.

    Last Friday, Trump said on his “Truth Social” account:

    “We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status,” Trump wrote in a social media post. “It’s what they deserve!”

    The President of the United States cannot take away the tax-exempt status of any individual or organization. That is a decision made by the IRS, and it is illegal for the President or Vice-President or any other government official to interfere in that decision. Such a decision is made by the IRS, must be made for cause, and the institution has the right to defend itself. The process can take years.

    If the President could order the IRS to audit or investigate his enemies, it would be a very dangerous policy. He can’t. With Trump, the law is a minor inconvenience, so who knows what he will do. The Supreme Court told him he has absolute immunity so maybe he can disregard the law.

    The Trump administration is blasting away at Harvard on multiple fronts. The Department of Homeland Security has threatened to revoke Harvard’s ability to enroll international students, who are 27 percent of Harvard’s enrollments.

    The Education Department has demanded that Harvard supply the names and email addresses of all foreign students who were expelled since 2016. The Department also wants the names of all scholars, researchers, students and faculty associated with any foreign government. Just a few days ago, Secretary McMahon informed Harvard that it is no longer eligible for new funding so long as it continues to oppose the president’s agenda. That would mean allowing Trump’s agents to take control of admissions, hiring, and curriculum. The nation’s most prestigious university would have to abandon its independence to Trump.

    The Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation have suspended over $2 billion in grants to Harvard for medical and scientific research. Studies that are focused on causes and cures for tuberculosis and ALS, for example, have come to a halt. Another $7 billion in research funding could be suspended. This could damage the research and work of hospitals across the Boston metro area, and the economy of Massachusetts as well. Since Massachusetts is a blue state, Trump doesn’t care.

    If this looks like harassment, that’s because it is.

    Trump is certainly no libertarian. He is using every federal source of funding to compel universities, colleges, schools, cities, and states to follow his commands.

    That’s not democracy. That’s dictatorship.



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  • Trump Launches an Era of Unprecedented Corruption in His Second Term

    Trump Launches an Era of Unprecedented Corruption in His Second Term


    The second Trump administration may well go down in history as the most corrupt presidency in our history. We learned yesterday that the Trump family crytocurrency just received an investment of $2 billion from a fund in Abu Dhabi; this is a sure way to gain access to the patriarch in the White House. Not only is he enriching himself and his family, but has also allowed Elon Musk to violate every ethical rule in the federal government while shackling his competitors.

    Steven Rattner, a columnist for The New York Times, details some of the ways that Trump enriches himself during his Presidency. We should not be surprised. Throughout his adult life, Trump has been a hustler, a con man, a performer, and a man who loves money.

    He wrote:

    No presidential administration is completely free from questionable ethics practices, but Donald Trump has pushed us to a new low. He has accomplished that by breaking every norm of good government, often while enriching himself, whether by pardoning a felon who, together with his wife, donated $1.8 million to the Trump campaign; promoting Teslas on the White House driveway; or holding a private dinner for speculators who purchase his new cryptocurrency.

    Mr. Trump’s blatant transgressions have swamped those of any modern president and even those of his first term. Remember the outrage when he refused to divest his financial holdings or when he used a Washington hotel he owned as a kind of White House waiting room? Those moves seem quaint in comparison.

    In his trampling of historically appropriate behavior, Mr. Trump appears to be pursuing several agendas. Personal enrichment stands out: Imagine any other president collecting a cut of sales from a cryptocurrency marketed with his likeness. There is the way he is expanding his powers: He has ignored or eliminated large swaths of rules that would have inhibited his freedom of action and his ability to put trusted acolytes in key roles. And then there’s rewarding donors, whether through pardons or favors for their clients.

    I was working in the Washington bureau of The Times when Richard Nixon resigned, and even he — taken down by his efforts to cover up his misdeeds — did not engage in such a vast array of sordid practices.

    The corruption of Trump 2.0 has not gotten the attention it deserves amid the barrage of news about Mr. Trump’s tariff wars, his attack on scientific research and his senior appointees’ Signal text chains. But self-dealing is such a defining theme of this administration that it needs to be called out. Like much that Mr. Trump has done in other areas, it announces to the world that America’s leaders can no longer be trusted to follow its laws and that influence is up for sale.

    Just as in the post-Nixon era, when guardrails were established to prevent transgressions, the next president could decide to restore some of the sound government practices that Mr. Trump has trampled on. But the damage he has inflicted by, say, pardoning his donors or lining his own pockets is irreversible.

    The below represents just a sampling of what’s transpired these past 100 days.

    • He turned a legitimate federal employee designation into a loophole. By giving senior officials such as Elon Musk the title “special government employee,” Mr. Trump avoided requirements that they publicly disclose their financial holdings and divest any that present conflicts before taking jobs in the administration.
    • He ended bans that stopped executive branch employees from accepting gifts from lobbyists or seeking lobbying jobs themselves for at least two years.
    • He loosened the enforcement of laws that curb foreign lobbying and bribery.
    • He dismissed the head of the office that polices conflicts of interest among senior officials.
    • He jettisoned the head of the office that, among other things, protects whistle-blowers and ensures political neutrality in federal workplaces.
    • He purged nearly 20 nonpartisan inspectors general who were entrusted with rooting out corruption within the government.

    Rewarding donors is part of any presidential administration. Every president in my memory appointed supporters to ambassadorships. But again, Mr. Trump has gone much further.

    • Jared Isaacman, a billionaire with deep tentacles into SpaceX, gave $2 million to the inaugural committee and was nominated to head NASA — SpaceX’s largest customer.
    • The convicted felon Trevor Milton and his wife donated $1.8 million to the campaign and Mr. Milton received a pardon, which also spared him from paying restitution.
    • The lobbyist Brian Ballard raised over $50 million for Mr. Trump’s campaign, and Mr. Trump handed major victories to two Ballard clients. He delayed a U.S. ban on China-owned TikTok his first day in office and killed an effort to ban menthol cigarettes, a major priority of tobacco company R.J. Reynolds, on his second.

    Mr. Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire who spent $277 million to back Mr. Trump and other Republican candidates, requires his own category.

    As a special government employee, Mr. Musk is supposed to perform limited services to the government for no more than 130 days a year. By law, no government official — even a special government employee — can participate in any government matter that has a direct effect on his or her financial interests. That criminal statute hasn’t stopped Mr. Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency from interacting with at least 10 of the agencies that oversee his business interests.

    • He installed a SpaceX engineer at the Federal Aviation Administration to review its air traffic control system. The F.A.A. is reportedly considering canceling Verizon’s $2.4 billion contract to update its aging telecommunications infrastructure in favor of a SpaceX’s Starlink product. (SpaceX has denied it is taking over the contract.)
    • SpaceX is a leading contender to secure a large share of Mr. Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense project, an effort that could involve billions of revenue for the winner.
    • X, Mr. Musk’s social media outlet, has become an official source of government news. The White House welcomed a reporter from the platform at a recent briefing, and at least a dozen government agencies started DOGE-focused X accounts.
    • As Mr. Musk’s political activities started to repel many potential customers of Tesla, his electric vehicle company, Mr. Trump lined Tesla vehicles up on the White House driveway and extolled their benefits. Then Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged Fox News viewers to buy Tesla shares.
    • DOGE nearly halved the team at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that regulates autonomous vehicles. The agency has been investigating whether Tesla’s self-driving technology played a role in the death of a pedestrian in Arizona.

    Critics of crypto argue that it has demonstrated little value beyond enabling criminal activity. Despite this, Mr. Trump has wasted no time eliminating regulatory oversight of the industry at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department, even as his family grows ever more invested in it.

    By enabling money to be delivered anonymously and without any bank participation, crypto offers the possibility for any individual or foreign state to funnel money to Mr. Trump and his family secretly. Moreover, Bloomberg News recently estimated that the Trump family crypto fortune is nearing $1 billion.

    • On the eve of his inauguration he released $TRUMP and $MELANIA memecoins — a type of crypto derived from internet jokes or mascots. Next, the S.E.C. announced it would not regulate memecoins. Then last week, Mr. Trump offered a private dinner at his golf club and a separate “Special VIP Tour” to the top 25 investors in $TRUMP, causing the price of the currency to surge and enriching the family. (That tour was initially advertised as being at the White House. Then the words “White House” disappeared, but the rest of that prize remained.)
    • The S.E.C. eliminated its crypto-enforcement program, ending or pausing nearly every crypto-related lawsuit, appeal and investigation. That includes the civil suit against Justin Sun, a crypto entrepreneur who had separately purchased $75 million worth of tokens tied to Mr. Trump’s family after the election.
    • The S.E.C. also suspended its civil fraud case against Binance, the huge crypto exchange that pleaded guilty to money-laundering violations and allowed terrorist financing, hacking and drug trafficking to proliferate on its platform. Soon after, the company met with Treasury officials to seek looser oversight while also negotiating a business deal with Mr. Trump’s family.
    • World Liberty Financial, a crypto company that Mr. Trump and his sons helped launch, said it had sold $550 million worth of digital coins. A business entity linked to him gets 75 percent of the sales.
    • The Trump family has said it will partner with the Singapore-based crypto exchange Crypto.com to introduce a series of funds comprising crypto and securities with a made-in-America focus.
    • The federal government’s “crypto czar,” David Sacks, Mr. Lutnick and Mr. Musk all have connections to the market. (Mr. Musk named DOGE after a memecoin.)
    • Mr. Trump is reportedly on his way to raising $500 million for his political action committees — highly unusual for a president who cannot run for re-election.
    • A new Trump Tower is underway in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s second largest city, with plans for two more projects for the kingdom announced after Mr. Trump’s November election victory, all in partnership with a Saudi company with close ties to the Saudi government.
    • Mr. Trump’s team asked about bringing the signature British Open golf tournament to his Turnberry resort in Scotland during a visit of the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, to the White House.
    • He posts news-making announcements on Truth Social, the company in which his family owns a significant stake.

    It’s all a sorry and sordid picture, a president who had already set a new standard for egregious and potentially illegal behavior hitting new lows with metronomic regularity.



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