FAP724: Massachusetts College Goal Sunday 2008 In Review

28 January 2008 1 views No Comment

Listen now [audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/financialaidpodcast/20080128.mp3″>MP3 file

Massachusetts College Goal Sunday, the day when students, parents, and families can gather to receive help completing the FAFSA, has come and gone. I was proud to again be part of the Framingham site under team leaders Beth Feinberg and Iris Godes. This year, much to our surprise, we more than doubled attendance from last year to the site to 165 families, which is a tribute to the marketing that the Massachusetts College Goal Sunday committee has done throughout the state.

As I did last year, I’ve put together some reflections and thoughts about the event.

Having that many people show up for FAFSA help was fantastic. I know I was certainly busy, answering questions ranging from “How do I report my parents on the FAFSA if they’re both dead?” to “How does an early 401(k) withdrawal impact financial aid eligibility?”. The day literally flew by with questions and answers. I didn’t even get one of the free cookies.

I’d suggest for other College Goal Sunday sites, and this was confirmed by others on the team, that some way should be made to distinguish between FAFSA experts and support volunteers. At MCGS, we all wore the same color shirt, so it was assumed by many that we all had equal levels of expertise. Out of 26 volunteers at our site, 5 of us were self-designated FAFSA experts ready to answer questions in detail about complex financial situations. Perhaps for other states and for Massachusetts next year, FAFSA experts can wear armbands or something to alleviate any frustration on the part of attendees.

Second, to the folks at the Department of Education, if you read or hear this – one of the main issues with the FAFSA on the Web application is inconsistency in its user interface. At the bottom of a lot of the tables as you go through the FAFSA there are buttons. Typically, the button just below a table, centered, fulfills the role of a submit button elsewhere on the Web, but on the FAFSA, it usually does something else. The previous and next buttons aren’t big, huge, or easily noticed, and you should put up a warning sign right on the front page of the FAFSA on the Web application to NOT use the Back button at any point or your application will blow up and start spitting out errors.

At the end of the process, all the actions are crammed into one small toolbar. Instead of doing that, I think it might be worthwhile to move the “Submit your FAFSA for processing” to a completely different line, and maybe make it glowing red or something so it’s obvious to the user what the next step is.

Speaking of unclear, there were several families looking for the 2008-2009 renewal FAFSA. There isn’t one anywhere on the FAFSA site or in the initial application. Thankfully, Carla Berg of Bentley College mentioned that the FAFSA renewal option was gone. Apparently, when you go to file a FAFSA as a returning student, the application pre-populates with last year’s data, but that’s not obvious anywhere on the site. Even if it did the same thing as the new application option, putting the Renewal option in the drop down box would solve a LOT of confusion.

The school code finder in the FAFSA web site is still less than ideal, especially if a school is generally known as one thing, but the Department of Education has a different canonical name. For example, three students said they couldn’t find their school in the school code finder, Mass Bay Community College. When I pulled up the list from FAFSAonline.com, we were able to find it easily – the FAFSA application didn’t understand that the canonical name, Massachusetts Bay Community College, is not how the school is generally known, even by the school itself (their web site is MassBay.edu). It might be helpful to have a browseable list of FAFSA school codes by state as a supplement to the search tool.

(Disclosure: the Student Loan Network operates FAFSAonline.com as an educational resource site. When you click the File a FAFSA Now button, you are taken to the Department of Education’s official FAFSA site, FAFSA.ed.gov)

I was alarmed by some of the comments by attendees. On a macroeconomic scale, it’s clear the economy is in a lot of trouble. Last year, questions from middle and upper middle class attendees tended towards questions about how to report various types of assets on the FAFSA. I heard a good number of times today from parents who were upside down on their mortgages that their mortgage debt was choking their finances, so much so that they showed up for the FAFSA for the first time because they weren’t sure their kids could go to school any more. One gentleman reported having had to cash out over $60,000 from his 401(k) to make ends meet. Times are not good, and despite what the politicians say, there’s definitely hurting on Main Street.

Another gentleman commented that he stopped by the get a second opinion about the FAFSA for his child before paying $100. When he said that, I asked him what he was talking about – he’d been on a paid FAFSA filing service that was going to charge him $100 to file his FAFSA. When we sat down to go through his FAFSA, there was absolutely nothing in his finances that warranted any kind of fee. Beware – except for a rare few individuals who have extremely complicated finances, there is no reason to pay to have your FAFSA filed; those rare few individuals likely already have a CPA and CFA on retainer.

Finally, a few thoughts on the event as a whole and its meaning. College Goal Sunday is more than just an afternoon of volunteer service. For employees of lenders like the Student Loan Network, it’s a great way to interact with your core audience in a non-transactional environment, to get a feel for the real concerns and issues that are on the minds of the people we aim to serve, as opposed to sitting in meetings trying to guess what students and families are thinking. For financial aid administrators, it’s an opportunity to work with students and populations outside that which your institution serves, and make a hard-hitting, nearly instant impact on many lives in one day above and beyond the service you already provide to your own students every day.

I salute the Lumina Foundation, NASFAA, and MASFAA for working together to create the opportunity for me.

Yes, me.

As much as I may have been able to help others, College Goal Sunday is a way for me to put myself to the ultimate test, working face to face with families, knowing that one mistake could keep someone from attending college, but one FAFSA filed that might not have been could open the doors to a brighter future for a student that might have remained closed forever. That’s an opportunity that doesn’t come along very often, the chance to make a direct, concrete, positive difference in many lives in just a few hours, so when it comes around, I’m happy to step up and see just what I can do.

I always leave College Goal Sunday with a renewed sense of optimism and energy about being in the financial aid world. The past year wasn’t necessarily a great one for financial aid professionals in the media, but just one afternoon can brush all of that away and remind you that our profession is a worthy one, and the work that we do can immediately change lives for the better.