How to Overcome FAFSA Delays and Avoid Financial Aid Setbacks

On this episode of FYI, Brad Barnett discusses steps institutions should take in response to the FAFSA delays impacting students and recruitment.

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Who is Brad Barnett?

Brad is a respected leader in financial aid administration, currently serving as Associate Vice President for Access & Enrollment Management/Director of Financial Aid & Scholarships at James Madison University.

In this Episode

Brad Barnett, Associate Vice President for Access & Enrollment Management/Director of Financial Aid & Scholarships at James Madison University, joins FYI host Gil Rogers to check back in on the unusual situation this year’s FAFSA delays have put institutions in and what steps can be done by enrollment managers to best prepare for the challenges that those delays present. Brad tells Gil about how institutions like JMU are leveraging tools like net price calculators and fostering an environment of reassurance to ensure that they are in the best position to handle the processing burden of the FAFSA backlog once the decisions start.

Brad contrasts the typical university with those utilizing the CSS profile and how they will differ in processing these backlogs at each place. Brad and Gil reiterate the need for tailored communication strategies in higher ed, particularly for low-income, first-generation students who face compounded barriers to higher education.

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Episode Transcript

Overcoming FAFSA Delays with Brad Barnett

Publishing Date: February 22, 2024

[00:00:00] Gil: All right. Welcome back to FYI, the For Your Institution Podcast, presented by Mongoose. I’m your host, Gil Rogers. And this is, I guess, continuing coverage of the consistently changing situation when it comes to the delays with the FAFSA and its impact on enrollment managers.

I’m lucky enough to have Brad Barnett on the podcast again. Brad joined a couple months ago now at this point to talk about financial aid strategies. And we talked about the new FAFSA a little bit as well. And so, as a follow-on to our recent podcast featuring Emily Coleman from HAI Analytics, I’m lucky to have Brad come on and talk about some boots-on-the-ground type scenarios. So, we’ve got the consultant that’s working with schools, and now we’ve got a representative from a school, right?

So, Brad, I’d love for you to reintroduce yourself to the folks who have missed our prior podcast, and then we can, kind of, hop in from there.

[00:00:59] Brad: Sure. Yeah, great to be back. So, thanks for having me back, Gil. I’m Brad Barnett, Associate Vice President of Access and Enrollment Management and Director of the Office of Financial Aid and Scholarships at James Madison University. Sorry, I have to take a breath when you say my title.

[00:01:14] Gil: I, I was going to say, do you, do you get paid by the letter in your title? Because that would be really cool if you did. Just add a zero for each letter. Do that. I’m going to start a petition.

[00:01:23] Brad: If it only works that way. I’m a state employee. They give us long titles, but that’s it.

[00:01:27] Gil: Hey, that’s good. But responsibility, influence, all those fun things.

[00:01:31] Brad: Sure, yeah.

[00:01:33] Gil: Let’s dive right into the topic du jour, and if you’ve been living under an enrollment management rock, the challenge that institutions are facing right now. I’ll give the high-level summary of what I’m seeing, and then you fill in the blanks and let me know if I’m off-base, is, clearly, there are challenges this cycle with respect to, first, the FAFSA was delayed for families. So, that’s going to be having an impact. And we’ve seen data recently filing rates. Then, getting data to the institutions has been delayed, and so there’s going to be timing issues with respect to packaging students. And most recently, I think it was two days ago when this podcast is being recorded, the government has outlined, “Well, we’re going to give some assistance to institutions and outline some ways that some, you know, rules they’re going to waive and things that they’re going to, you know, be less, students being targeted for confirmation and all that sort of fun stuff.”

And so, obviously, this is an interesting time, to say the least, for enrollment managers and financial aid leadership. So, Brad, from your purview, how are things going? What’s on your mind? And what did I miss in my summary of what’s happening?

[00:02:39] Brad: First of all, what a loaded question to start with, how are things going? Yeah, it’s interesting, to say the least. You know, we’re all still really anxious to get to ‘25, ‘26 and just put this implementation year behind us. I don’t think that sentiment has changed at all.

How it’s going, though, is the clock is just, it’s just ticking and the calendar is getting shorter and shorter and shorter. So, I think you’re seeing schools are feeling some sense of pressure to make sure our systems are working, to make sure things are getting tested, to get these FAFSAs in. There’s roughly 17 million FAFSAs filed every single year. And I think the last data we saw on how many FAFSAs have currently been filed, it’s somewhere between three and a half and four million, depending on what day of the week. So, we’re still shy of all the FAFSAs that are actually going to be filed as the year progresses. And we’re all really concerned about how we’re going to get this data in our system to get our first-year class.

[00:03:29] Gil: So, what are some of the things that institutions are doing? Because you can’t just sit on your hands and wait, right? There are methods that you could use and there’s communications that should happen. What are some of the things you’re doing? What are some of the things your colleagues are talking about?

[00:03:43] Brad: Yeah. The thing we’re really doing is trying to communicate. And this is one of those situations where you really can’t over-communicate. We are reaching out to every student who has applied for admission at JMU and their family. We have early action, and we have regular decision. We’re not an early-decision school.

So, we have already communicated to all of our early-action admits and their family members twice. We’ve communicated to all the students who applied for regular decision and their family members twice. We’re communicating with the JMU campus at large, letting them know what’s going on and here are some talking points, because we also know in this period where students are trying to determine where they want to go to school, they’re not just talking with us. They’re talking with our academic colleagues on other parts of campus or talking with admissions, or they’re talking with the registrar’s office, student affairs. So, we want to make sure that they have some good talking points. To reassure students that we will get FAFSA data as soon as we get it, we will communicate with them regarding their preliminary awards.

And in the meantime, we’re suggesting students use our net price calculator. Every school has a net price calculator. Some are more robust than others. But it’s a great place where we can send students to get some sense of what things might look like once we start getting FAFSA data.

[00:05:03] Gil: Yeah, and I think that’s one of the items Emily recommended on our prior podcast, was, you know, you got to use huge caveats, big bold red letters, “These are estimates, but it’s all subject to verification,” right? And I think it’s very similar, in a sense, of, when we think about what institutions would do to select SAT scores from high schools, right, and when they would get it on their transcript and then still need the score report from the college board, those sorts of things where we can take iterative steps to get information that we need to help move the process along and then verify those things later, and if that helps get students information to feel like they’re being responded to and being supported.

Because I, I can imagine there’s scenarios where, and we talked about this when you were on the podcast prior, was that you’ve got current families who have been through this process before, and this is going to impact them in one way. And we’ve got first-year families who this is, kind of, the first thing they’ve ever done. And now, looking back at that conversation, it’s like, well, hopefully, they’ll have this experience ever again. But they don’t know, per se, that it’s the federal government’s situation. They know they’re not getting data or they’re not getting information from the school that they’ve applied to. And sure, we can try to deflect that situation, but really, it’s the institution who needs to be responsive and supportive, right?

[00:06:24] Brad: Yeah, and we’re all trying to do that. I think the blessing of this, if there is a blessing or silver lining, is, is to your question or kind of point, we are all in this together. So, the one thing is, for most of the students who are looking at schools, they’re getting the same kind of messages from most of us, which is we don’t have your FAFSA data. There’s nothing we can tell you right now regarding your aid eligibility, but we’ve got this really cool net price calculator that’ll give you some sense. If you can answer a few questions, if you can hang on with us, we’ll get you the information as soon as we get it from the feds.

So, they’re hearing that from most schools, the outliers, and I call them outliers in my mind because it’s a smaller subset of schools who use the CSS profile. Those institutions are getting out need-based financial aid offers because they’re not relying on the FAFSA. They have another tool, another application. So, they can put merit awards on the table. They can also put need-based awards on the table. Those of us who are FAFSA-dependent, what we’re getting are merit-based awards out. Everything need-based is just on hold. So, if a student is comparing six schools and all those six schools just use the FAFSA, They should be getting a pretty similar message from all of them.

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[00:08:27] Gil: Yeah. And chances are, I was talking to a colleague about this yesterday, in the sales world, right? The first sales rep to respond to someone who’s doing outreach and research, 90% of the time, they close the deal because they were the first one to respond, first one out there. And that’s the way college search worked for decades, right, was first in the mailbox. We got the list from the college board or ACT or NRCCUA or Encoura now, right? And we were the first one in their mailbox, so we’re going to be first on their mind.

I don’t know if the financial aid package coming first, those rules apply from a response perspective. Because if, if a student is applied to six schools or they’re accepted into six schools and one of the schools they’ve applied to uses the CSS profile and the other five are communicating well with them about the issues with the FAFSA, I don’t think they’re going to just hop to that one school because they got the aid package, right? They need to be able to evaluate it against something, right?

[00:09:20] Brad: Yeah, I think that’s a pretty fair statement for what we’re dealing with, with those few schools who are sending out need-based information off of the profile. I will say, though, we are feeling a bit more of the race to May 1st this year, so you could see a situation where schools that are more readily to respond, as soon as you start getting FAFSA information—their systems are working, their packaging policies are in place, they can start generating aid offers—those schools have the ability to do that, may have more an advantage over some of those schools who simply don’t. Systems don’t work. Things are very manual. They’re really behind the 8 ball. May 1st is going to be creeping up.

So, we are concerned, just industry-wide, that there could be a subset of schools who almost won’t be part of that conversation of, where is the student going to go to school? Because they’re going to get stuff out so late or so close to May 1st, students could get anxious, they could start making decisions on a handful of offers that have already come in before some schools even have the opportunity to, kind of, get a seat at the table. That’s a compressed timetable that’s really creating some stress and consternation for everyone.

[00:10:27] Gil: Yeah. So, I guess, let’s talk about what those institutions might consider doing, because you’re not going to necessarily be able to revamp your entire financial aid process again overnight, right? And so, you, kind of, know that that’s going to happen because you know your systems. I think, back to years ago, I was working with a school that they were one of those institutions. It happens every cycle that they accidentally sent the admit letter to the people who had incomplete applications. And so, that happens all the time. Perfect CRM platforms. You know, Slate is perfect, but somehow it still happens. The VP of enrollment at that institution turned lemonade out of lemons with the situation because it was students who had incomplete applications got those notifications, right? And so, the admissions counselors had to work very directly and quickly to get in touch with those students. You know, this is a tuition-driven private school. So, most of those students were admittable, anyway. But it turned them into admissions counselors again and not application processors, right?

And so, I feel like this is that lemonade out of lemons scenario, silver lining, like you mentioned, where we have to focus on being in touch and communicating well with students. We can’t just let the system run. We have to be helping them and supporting them. And so, for those institutions whose package might be arriving later because their systems are not up to snuff, they still have some control over how they communicate the cadence of their communication, the quality of their communication. And that’s got to have some impact on the student’s desire to wait to get that final package.

[00:12:00] Brad: It should, yeah. I mean, this is, there’s going to be a lot of reassuring. We’re gearing up for one of our major freshman recruitment programs where early-action students who had been admitted and their families all come out on campus for a day. And there’s academic programming. There’s student affairs programming. There’s a programming all over campus. We usually do a few workshops. We meet with parents.

And generally speaking, we’re talking about the financial aid offer they’ve already received and just helping them work out some of the finer details, whether or not JMU is an affordable institution for them. We’re having discussions that, this year, we’re going to have no aid to offer them or show them. Yet, we’re still going to staff. Our conversations are, we need to be staffed, we need to be here, because we’re just going to be doing a lot of reassuring. We’re going to be doing a lot of hand-holding and just telling people, “We get it. We understand that you’re frustrated, that we can’t give you a number. We know. This is why, as soon as we get information, we’re going to give it to you.”

So, I think it’s on us as institutions to try to be as reassuring to some of these students and parents who are looking for a place to go to school next year. That we get it’s a complex time. We’re here to help. We’re not ignoring you. These are the things we’re dealing with.

So, the communication strategy is very different this year from what it has been in prior years. In prior years, it’s your communication strategy is you’re making offers and then you’re communicating with people and follow up to your offers. This year, you’re doing a lot of communication before you even have the ability to make an offer, just reassuring people that an offer is eventually going to come.

[00:13:35] Gil: Right, right. And I think the opportunity, again, to, kind of, reframe the human connection comes in and supporting students through that process, because he said the hand-holding should have been happening all along. Now, it has to happen. There’s no choice. And if there’s one thing most people can agree on is the federal government’s hard to deal with in these situations. And so, you can at least bond as humans and make jokes about how it’s the government’s fault, right?

[00:14:00] Brad: It’s a low-hanging fruit. Yeah, that’s so low-hanging fruit,

[00:14:04] Gil: The punching bag is, is the feds, right? So, we can blame them, blame the government. One of the things Emily mentioned when I had her on talking is, and this is the… I guess this is going to be the newest wrinkle to the higher ed admissions enrollment hype machine, right? There’s always the stress everybody out about the process and media coverage and news coverage. And don’t panic. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Are people panicking that you’re talking to? Or, is it more of a, kind of, a thoughtful methodical type of approach? Or, is it somewhere in the middle?

[00:14:32] Brad: No, there’s people all over the spectrum. There’s people who are in full on-panic mode. There’s people who are more methodical. And there’s folks who are just, kind of, “Look, it is what it is, and we’re just going along with it. And we’re going to have some strategy, and we’re going to deal with the outcome when the outcome comes. And we’ll make this thing work.”

We’re all human beings. There’s over 30,000 financial aid professionals in this country, more than that. And we’re all just dealing with it as best we possibly can to try to help all these prospective students. So, it is interesting when you talk to colleagues because everyone’s, kind of, at a little different place. We are trying to temper some of the frustration as best we can, because the reality is we still have to do something. You can only grab a complaint so much before you have to figure out a strategy. And you have to determine how you’re going to help these students, because there could be, depending on how we handle this, you know, we’re worried that there could be, kind of, a lost class of low-income first-generation students who get so frustrated and turned off by this process, and they can’t get through this process. Maybe, they don’t even go to college next year. And if they don’t go to college after high school, will they ever come back?

And those are questions that we don’t have answers to, but we know that, as an industry, we need to do our best to keep those people engaged, so they don’t give up. Yeah, it is a frustrating process right now. There is no way to sugarcoat that.

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[00:16:41] Gil: You bring up a good point about, like, if you think about these students, and I’m having one of these aha moments about this, right, and not in a good way, unfortunately, but the students who are coming into this process this year from the first time are also students who were negatively impacted by remote education and the challenges during COVID, right? And so, now, we’re dealing with a class of students who are going to have academic preparedness issues. They’re going to have social adjustment anxiety issues. And now, they’re having this financial aid process that’s going to push them back.

And so, it’s a really tough position to be in for the students and their families, having been the, kind of, the class that, like, went through that whole situation. And, you know, when I talked with Emily last week, when we had her on, from the financial aid officer’s perspective, you know, when we look at the data, we look at the numbers and our models and the impact of different scenarios, COVID had its own outliers. This will now have its own outliers. But when you go down a level and actually think about the students and the human beings, this is a hard situation for them to navigate through.

[00:17:44] Brad: Yeah, thanks for helping me to feel better. I appreciate this counseling session. I mean, you’re 100% right. I mean, the complexities that are involved in this, they’re deep. It’s not a simple issue. And when you talk to Emily and others, and we just look at our metrics anyway, you know, we all have our metrics and our tools that we use to evaluate packaging policies and how much money we can give students and what our yields are going to be. All that math, well, I won’t say all, but a lot of that math, kind of, got thrown out the window with a new FAFSA anyway, because we were dealing with a new SAI, not an EFC. We were dealing with new applicants, new aid eligibility.

So, all of our old modeling, really, wasn’t 100% applicable to the new FAFSA, anyway. So, then, we were all trying to build new modeling tools to try to determine as best we can how we can help students in a FAFSA that we’ve never actually processed.

Well, now you add on the complexities of kicking the can down the road and making it so late to actually get FAFSA data. And so, late to actually get aid offers to students. And that’s a whole nother level of complexity that we’re sitting back, saying, “How do you model what’s going to happen now?” Because it was different under a time period when you thought you were at least going to get FAFSAs at a reasonable timeframe. You could then still react and have a little bit of time to make some adjustments. Now, we pretty much have to have things set before we get the FAFSAs in place, because we won’t have as much time to react. And we’re just going to go straight into processing mode.

[00:19:13] Gil: Well, they say diamonds are forged under pressure, right? So, hopefully…

[00:19:17] Brad: Yeah. There’s going to be one big diamond by the time we’re done.

[00:19:20] Gil: One big diamond, yeah. So, to address the concerns of, let’s look at the spectrum of people, the people who are like, “Oh, we’re going to be fine. We’re, we’re not going to worry about them,” this podcast is not for them, right? This is for the panic spectrum, right?

[00:19:32] Brad: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:32] Gil: You see more of the middle of the road, “We’re going to work through this. We’re going to manage through it.” So, as a middle-of-the-road, “we’ll manage through it,” even-keeled person, what is your advice to the panickers, your colleagues that are looking at this process like deer in the headlights?

[00:19:50] Brad: Yeah. So, there, there’s a few things. One is, make sure that you have a community of other financial aid folks around you. You cannot do this alone. There’s Slack channels. There’s state, national, regional associations. There’s people to reach out to. Most folks are reaching out to people and have some other financial aid colleagues to commiserate with and walk them through this.

The second thing is, ensure that you are communicating with your leaders on your campus. Everybody needs to know what’s going on. They need to know the challenges. Don’t try to hide any of this. They need to know the struggles. They need to know the issues. Hopefully, you’re having those conversations. If not, it’s really time to have those.

And then, the last thing I would say is, if you need resources, depending on your school, you probably saw that the secretary of education made an announcement, and it’s gone public now, about the $50 million that’s going to be available to help some under-resourced schools. And they’re working with nonprofits like NASPA to try to get some, either, federal assistance or maybe some financial aid professionals who have the ability and capacity to help other schools to be able to provide some assistance to some of these lower-resourced schools, the ones we were talking about earlier.

It may just be way behind the 8 ball on being able to react to this. So, follow the, kind of, the instructions and the guidance that you saw out in that to look for some assistance and to ask for some help sooner rather than later. Because if we can find other aid professionals or somebody else who can drop in and give you a little bit of time to help figure out this, then it’s going to allow you to react better once we actually do start getting FAFSAs.

So, there is some resource help available. It’ll help some schools. It won’t help all schools. It’s not available for all schools. The schools who are well-resourced, this is not for them. But there’s a good population of schools who are under-resourced, and they really need some help. So, now, we’re seeing there’s some responsiveness on behalf of the department of education putting forth some money with a foundation in order to provide resources to help schools.

[00:21:49] Gil: For that stressed-out folks, we’ll put links to resources and articles that may be of help in the episode notes. So, take a look there and find that information. And I guarantee you, whatever company sponsors, the happy hour at the NASPA conference is going to have a very big bar tab to pay after this cycle. So, good luck, whatever company that is.

Brad, thank you so much again for reaching out to hop on and being a part of this conversation. If people want to get in touch with you and continue the conversation, what are the best ways to do that?

[00:22:20] Brad: Yeah, you can email me at JMU. My email’s on the JMU website. You can hit me up on LinkedIn. Those are probably two of the best places. I’m not huge into social media.

[00:22:29] Gil: Awesome. Well, appreciate your time, Brad, and we will see everyone next time on FYI.[00:22:36] Brad: All right. See you.

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