By ALLI SCHIEBER
Editor-in-Chief
The FASFA Simplification Act is affecting millions around the United States including Alva.
FASFA had to be released by January 1 even though the Department of Education was not quite prepared for it, so they opened for short periods of time to let people apply. They hoped they could look at those applications and work out any issues they had. Which is the stage they are at right now.
Students can complete the application now; however, their application will say it is completed then that it is in review. It will probably be in review for a while as they are looking at the first 3 million applications as test ones to get the problems worked out.
“As of right now, we tell students to go ahead and complete it,” Tara Hannaford Director of Financial Aid and Scholarshipssaid.
Around Feb. 1 the Department of Education told schools they will not be sending the ISIR, which is the FASFA record, until mid-March. Now instead of hearing back in three to five days. You will not hear from the University for a while.
Northwestern’s software company, Colleague, told Northwestern that once they get the test students, they must fix the software since it is set on last years criteria.
They have been working on for the last year, but the education department keeps changing things and the software must update to all the changes.
Northwestern is hoping to start rewarding fall aid mid- March but are anticipating to not be able to do that until the beginning of April.
“The biggest thing we want to get out to students is it will be coming its just this is totally different from any other year,” Hannaford said. “Its not just us its every school across the country.”
With continuing students if they have not had a major income shift their financial aid should look about the same. There are two major factors that could potentially hurt some of Northwestern’s students.
The first one being that if you do live on a family farm you have to count that as an asset now and the second one being the number of students in your family does not matter anymore.For freshman, the biggest thing is that they have never filled out FASFA before and do not know what grants and loans they are eligible for.
With the simplification part of the simplification act the FASFA will be able to pull the tax information directly from the IRS. This makes it to where students and parents will not have to link or manually enter their tax information. They just type in their social security number and consent then FASFA will pull the information from IRS.
A benefit of Northwestern is fortunate to not have deadlines for when students need to have their FASFA done like some bigger schools. Northwestern has also started focusing on the scholarship side so that families can at least see what they are getting from that.
“If a student does have a big change from last year to this year, they can always come in and have us look at it and revaluate it and make sure what they put on the FASFA was correct,” Hannaford said.
