Students with undocumented parents struggle with updated FAFSA application

Students with undocumented parents have been struggling with the new updated FAFSA application.

On November 15, 2023, the Federal Student Aid released new details on the redesigned Free Application for Federal Student Aid form taking effect in 2024-2025. The new application entails fewer questions, allows students to transfer tax data directly from the IRS and includes new formulas that should grant more aid to more students. Despite the ideal expectation of a quick application process, a particular group of students says they are excluded from the FAFSA process: students who have undocumented parents. Consequently, numerous applicants find themselves in a state of uncertainty, unsure if they will manage to afford the upcoming fall semester.

The FAFSA deadline has been pushed back several times this year due to a series of issues such as calculation errors in how the Department of Education determines how much money applicants will receive. However, students and faculty at CSULB have yet to hear anything from the DOE in regards to when the glitch affecting students from immigrant families will be resolved.

On the previous FAFSA application, if a student’s parent didn’t have a social security number they had two options: to fill the SSN section with 000-00-000 or to print out the forms, sign them, and send them out. However, this year, the option no longer appears on the website.

Eighteen-year-old Sofia Villanueva is a first-year student at CSULB, and one of the many students who had trouble filling out the application due to her parents’ immigration status. She described this year's FAFSA application as headache-inducing and said that due to the glitch she was not able to fully complete her application.

“My parents don't have a social security number, but I never imagined it would be so difficult for parents with no social security number to sign their children’s application,” she said. “Since we couldn’t create an account before the deadline, I ended up submitting an incomplete application.”

Last year, she was able to print out the forms, manually fill them out and then send them out alongside her parents’ signatures. Yet this year, when she would try to create an account for her parents and select the option that they did not have an SSN, the website would glitch and send them right back to the beginning.

She now finds herself anguished, waiting for the glitch to be fixed and the site to be properly functioning so that she can finally create an account for at least one of her parents and have them sign off on it.

Bella Najera, a sophomore at CSULB faced similar problems when it came to selecting no SSN for her mother.

“Initially I wasn’t even able to create an account for her, and when I finally did it took about a week for them to send us the verification email,” said Najera.

She was able to find some comfort in knowing the FAFSA had made the decision to push back the application deadline to May 2nd.

Norma Salcedo and her team at the Dream Success Center at CSULB work to provide holistic services, resources and support to members of the Beach community impacted by immigration policies. They commit to providing programs for academic support, mental health, identity exploration, as well as career and professional development.

“ [FAFSA] created this process so that it would be more seamless to students, but without acknowledging that this change was going to impact mixed-status families,” Salcedo said.

Salcedo alongside her team have noticed an increase in families who are feeling worried due to the ongoing situation, some of whom even blame themselves for their student being unable to complete the application. There is a growing fear that these students will not be able to get financial aid simply because of their parent’s immigration status.

“What I would like the families to know is that it is not their fault, it is a system error, a fix is coming, and everyone is fully aware of it,” Salcedo said.

Although the FAFSA Issue Alerts website shows that this problem has been known since as far back as Jan. 4, the glitch preventing students like Villanueva and Najera from submitting a fully complete application has yet to be resolved, and is largely unacknowledged in official channels, except for the entry made on the official FAFSA website on April 9 this year stating that when a student attempts to invite a parent to contribute to the 2024-2025 FAFSA form, and the parent or guardian does not have an SSN the student encounters an error message that reads “Unable to Complete This Action.”

The CSULB Financial Aid Office and the Dream Success Center are working closely with one another to ensure students know that multiple resources are being offered to them, such as walk-ins, appointments and even a FAFSA Simplification Page that provides in-depth details about the changes FAFSA has undergone.

Salcedo encourages students and families who find themselves struggling due to this situation to visit the Dream Success Center, where they offer one-on-one support to students and parents if they need help with FAFSA completion.

The Dream Success Center can be found inside the Shakirian Student Success Center on the second floor in RM 290. Salcedo highly encourages CSULB students to visit their website, or follow their Instagram @csulbdsc for the latest updates on the FAFSA glitch as it is released by the U.S. Department of Education.