The FAFSA Conundrum and the Quest for Solutions

Gil Rogers sits down with Joel Bauman to discuss the FAFSA Fiasco and where to go from here.

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Who is Joel Bauman?

Joel is the Executive Vice President for Enrollment at Duquesne University.

In this Episode

Joel Bauman, Senior Vice President for Enrollment at Duquesne University, joins FYI host Gil Rogers to talk about the recent FAFSA turmoil that has left students and institutions in a bind. With Joel’s unique perspective as both a university administrator and a parent, they wade through the choppy aftermath of the FAFSA miscalculation crisis. 

Discover how disparities in university resources are creating waves in the financial aid landscape and what this may mean for the future of higher education. As we navigate the often confusing corridors of financial assistance, Joel’s insights remind us of the importance of collaboration and the pressing need for enhanced resources and tools.

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Episode Transcript

The FAFSA Conundrum and the Quest for Solutions with Joel Bauman

Publishing Date: April 2, 2024

[00:00:06] Gil: All right. Welcome back to FYI, the For Your Institution podcast, presented by Mongoose. I am your host, Gil Rogers. And today, we’re going to continue to continue our coverage of the new FAFSA rollout. We thought we had this conversation put to bed as data was starting to be transmitted to institutions, but, you know, this is higher ed. Nothing is as we predict. And so, now, I have Joel Bauman, who is the Senior Vice President for Enrollment at Duquesne University, on today. Joel, you want to say hello?

[00:00:39] Joel: Hello, everyone.

[00:00:41] Gil: How you feeling today, Joel?

[00:00:42] Joel: It is Monday. And oftentimes, you’ve heard Manic Mondays. We call it Mack Truck Mondays, when all the voicemails and emails have come in over the weekend, and all the requests have piled up. So, we use Mondays to do catch up.

[00:00:56] Gil: There you go, there you go. Well, and I don’t mean to take this whole situation lightly, but sometimes, all you can do is just, kind of, throw your hands up and laugh at the moment. But this is, we’re in a serious point now where I’m going to read the tweet from NASFA. And we’ll go from there. This was from last week as of this recording.

USEdGov announced today that a miscalculation in the formula of the FAFSA resulted in incorrect financial need information for several hundred thousand students being sent to colleges and universities. And then, of course, there’s the full statement. We’ll put a link to the full statement, if you haven’t read it, in the episode notes for the podcast.

But, Joel, I reached out very shortly after this was posted. You made some very, astute comments about how institutions are, kind of, challenged to navigate this scenario. So, I’d love for you to give us your high-level perspective on the challenge that we’re facing right now. And we’ll go from there.

[00:01:54] Joel: You bet. I should say that this particular Monday, we are greeting all the piled-up information and this latest announcement with a lot of energy in our reserve tank because we were all celebrating the Duquesne Dukes basketball team making it to the round of 32 for the first time in 50 years.

So, one of the reasons we weren’t answering emails on the weekend like we normally do was we’re out celebrating the accomplishments of our basketball team. So, that’s been, kind of, fun. Having said that, yesterday was also an admitted student day, our first admitted student day. We have one in March. We try to do one before Easter. And then we’re going to have another one on April 13th.

What was fascinating that I decided to present, there’s always a financial aid session for families. I decided to do that myself along with the team, A, because the team has been working like the Duquesne and answering all these questions and trying to convey a sense of whatever, sense of lessened anxiety to the families, and letting them know, at each and every step of the way, where things are. So, I needed to give them a break.

Also, I wanted to get a sense from the families myself because I can ask questions that maybe the team may not be as comfortable because it may be more direct to the families, whereas I can, given the fact that, A, I’ve been doing this for a really long time at four or five different schools and can give them that vantage points for multiple states, also, because I’ve got three daughters, two of whom have completed this process, and my youngest is a freshman currently here at Duquesne, and so I have done the old FAFSA.

And I’m doing the new PAFSA. So, I thought I can give that perspective to the families from actually being current parent. The latest news was, sort of, people are, kind of, sanguine now about, of course, there’s a new wrinkle in this. And does it affect me? And if not, all those families that it does affect, and we’re all, sort of, in this together, how much more information can I organize and glean in order to make the best decision, right?

So, they are… maybe the word is shell shocked. And I did two sessions. I’d say there were about 200 families between that two sessions. And they were singularly sanguine about all the schools are going to do this. There’s some schools that have given me some information. There’s some schools that have given me some advice. But at the end of the day, we’re all going to wait for X, Y, and Z to happen before we make a decision.

We are trying to analyze what this means for our population. Our understanding right now is that 200,000 number that they threw out there is not evenly distributed among schools. It’s not evenly distributed amongst the applicants. It’s dependent students who have an asset indicator in their FAFSA data that suggests it may change the SAI calculation. Right now, since that just came out, we’re going back and saying, “What would have that done for us last year?”

Like, how many of our students actually… because we can’t test our current FAFSA files because we just got a few, right? So, what would that mean for us? And right now, it seems to be that calculation, and I could be wrong, I defer to the other financial aid experts out there in the world who have their thumb on this, it seems to me it’s unevenly distributed towards the higher-income brackets of where this gets reported.

So, I think that depends on the kind of school you are and the kind of population you’ve got, the kind of students you serve, as you would expect through all the story. And that actually made me think about also this post I put out there. And I’m not the first one to notice this. And I’m not a crusader, but I did start thinking about the haves and the have nots.

I did start thinking about well-resourced institutions that have the staffing, that are in urban areas, that have pockets reserve of expertise, that have the ability to get remote work in and attract talent that way to serve the students, and the ability to analyze data in real time in a quick way, and have technological support and expertise to use these systems, and we’re an Ellucian Banner School, to get answers to these questions to better serve the students.

And then thinking about, I have a group of colleagues. We’ve been in this business for a long time together. We have these colleagues. We can reach out to them and ask questions. We can reach out to them for their advice. And it just strikes me that even though the national organizations, NACAC, NASFA, have all reached out, have all recommended extending deadlines, you can see this in the zero sum gaming theory approach.

If you check the NACAC deadline extensions, you know, who’s saying undecided, who’s saying case by case, who’s saying that because that’s all they can do, who’s saying that because they want to get a sense of being able to somehow massage the applicant pool or the PR, and who actually can wait or can’t extend?

[00:07:01] Gil: I’m going to read your post back to you for our viewing audience and listening audience. And we’ll put a link directly to your LinkedIn and to this post in the episode notes for our listeners so they can comment and engage and share with it as well, but here it is in my best Joel impersonation. No, I’m just kidding.

It is, “Oh, boy, starting to keep me up at night. How can we, as an industry and collective of all who care about our students, come together and better serve our families in the currently not well-functioning, “system,” without being accused of collusion and running afoul of anti-trust issues and not succumb to competitive zero-sum thinking?”

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[00:08:21] Gil: I’ll give a little history lesson for our listeners. For newer admissions counselors who might be new to the space, NACAC, for forever, had the standard practices that were generally accepted by colleges and universities around national candidates’ reply date for May 1st around incentives for early commitments, a number of issues and challenges.

And then a couple years ago, federal government came in and said, “Can’t do that, anti-trust, anti-competitive.” And so, we had to back off of those as, kind of, our rules and regs, and have more of guidelines, right, and which is, kind of, what they were anyway, but it’s, kind of, reframing things and making it so that we’re not, as an industry, becoming anti-competitive.

I mean, if you go down this road of, you know, there’s other industries where there’s price fixing, and we do have issues of access in higher education, and there are challenges, but you have to look at these things in the spirit in which they’re created, right? And so, now, we’re in a situation where if we had the ability to say, “Okay. We’re going to have every in the country adjust or…” but it’s not that simple, right, because everybody’s got their own budget deadlines.

Everybody’s got their own desires for prestige and access. And so, I’d love for you to go further to those points of wave a magic wand, perfect world scenario, what are some things that we could and should be doing? And maybe some things can be done. Maybe some things can’t unless it’s a school-by-school basis. But given this, obviously, the FAFSA was supposed to be, you know, a simplified process for students.

And the narrative that I’ve heard through the various conversations that I’ve had about this topic over the past few weeks is this is a one-year glitch, and it will be easier for families in the future, but the families that are going through, and I’ve said this before, this process now for the first time are the same families that were impacted by COVID and remote education and shutting down of the world when they were starting high school, right?

And so, you’ve got this population of students that we need to step up and support in a better way, right, in a different way, because it’s a different class than we’ve ever experienced before. And so, with that as the tapestry, Joel, what are some things that you think, that are on your mind, and things that we can think about to better support families and avoid that, kind of, zero-sum game, race-to-the-bottom thought process that we’re driven to and pushed to sometimes?

[00:10:35] Joel: Yeah, absolutely. And the thing is, in higher ed, again, we’re all, despite all the different budget positions, marketplace positions, locations, needs, right? So, as a reminder, you remind us about the NACAC question and around the May 1st deadline and the anti-trust, the other anti-trust case that lingers over all this. And I could see why institutions and risk management suggests that 568 group financial collusion finding.

So, I can see why the system is a push me, pull you, as that famous Dr. Doolittle character was. That’s where we are at an institutional level. On the one hand, we want to support students. On the other hand, though, we cannot bring to bear our shared interest and shared responsibilities and shared resources to support in a global way. So, what would work? Why do we need to know and drive decisions by families?

On a Pollyanna side, on an optimistic side, it’s because there are real needs to plan. There are course. If you don’t have a deep bench of faculty, don’t have a deep bench of student services, right, you need to plan your housing inventory. You need to plan your course schedule. You need to figure out which faculty to hire in which programs. All this depends on having a sense of your entering class.

If you’re a school that counts on that, if you’re a school, again, haves and have nots, where you can pull up resources as you need in real time, you’re not as anxious to find out that information. Here’s a fantasy approach. And there are all sorts of consortiums. What if we, as a collective, said we need to support our students? And I do need to know about course sections.

And I do need to know maybe those of us in a region can get together and say, “Actually, let’s quickly come up with a revenue share program where if you’re missing Name X class, biology, and biology labs, and then we’ll help support your students. You help support our students. We’ll have a different schedule, right?”

There’s just ways that we’ve never been able to talk to each other because of this. Would that be somehow colluding, or would that be supporting each other? And would the families be appreciative of not having to make a decision under duress? Because as you identified, the whole last four years has been under duress?

[00:13:03] Gil: Yeah. And I think that’s the issue, right? We try to encourage or force institutions to do things that are, “right for students,” but then we don’t allow processes that would actually support them better, right? And now, we’re in a situation where, on one hand, the challenge was always trying to encourage students to make commitments earlier and earlier, right? And that was part of the issue with the challenges with early deadlines.

And the pushback we get is, like, give the students as much time as possible. But now, you’re almost in a position where, with May 1st coming up, the students are going to get their package later and later. Now, they have even less time on the front end and the back end.

And they’re, they’re, kind of, in a rock-and-hard place situation where, like you said, they’re waiting to hear back, and because institutions have taken different approaches to supporting their students and maybe not have communicated about it because they can’t or they don’t want to because of competitive issues, et cetera. I know, I know one of the prior guests that I had on about this topic was Emily Coleman from HAI Analytics.

And one of the things that they do is they support institutions with financial aid modeling and predictive modeling and budgeting. There are many companies that do it. And before we hopped on and started recording, you were sharing some thoughts about how many institutions have outsourced their financial aid work because they can’t find people to do the work or people don’t want to do the work, but one of the things that I, I remember that we’ve talked about a couple of times here is the issue of the predictability and the issue of using your data for supporting enrollment decisions.

But when that deadline is going to be, what, a week after a student gets their package versus, we were being criticized when it was a month before or two months before, right? And so, some schools have done slate forms. Some have done CSS profiles. Some have done their own in-house built-up program to provide at least an estimated package. But everybody’s handled it differently.

So, now, families are being… you know, they can’t compare apples to apples right now, right? And so, what are, I, I guess, the message to the industry and message to the families? I just made mess of all of these things and outlying all these different challenges, but I think that’s a reflection of, kind of, where we’re at right now, right, is what do we do next?

[00:15:13] Joel: It’s the higher ed financial aid version of the multiverse movie… what is it, the Everything Everywhere All at Once happening. So, I would connect the following Venn circles or follow the bouncing ball. I’d encourage everybody just to go look at the NASFA jobs board, the National Association of Financial Aid Administrators. I would then urge everyone to download a copy of the NASFA Benchmark 2023 study and read the executive summary.

You don’t have to go through the whole thing. And it’s, I think, it’s a clarion call to the kind of underappreciation of a financial aid in the expertise, the financial aid staff, financial aid experts, in their own right, and professionals in their own right, as an industry and, and within each school as well. So, I connect those two dots, then I connect it again back to the resourcing question. You talked about predictive modeling.

And you talked about which system could be adapted to do the, sort of, support of student of giving information to families so they could start to address a decision-making pathway, right? So, it’s not so much they’ll be able to make a decision, but there’s a path, a time path, of some information where there’s a range of possibilities. So, it’s not a complete surprise or unknown. There’s a range of possibilities. The range of available federal aid, there’s a range.

For those of us that have state grants, there’s a range of possibilities, right? So, we can start letting families anticipate, plus or minus. Before moving here to, to Pittsburgh, I was in Florida for a while. And as you all know, those spaghetti diagrams and the cone of possibilities, and it could land here, it could land there. It’s not going to land in Houston tonight, but it’s somewhere over Pensacola.

So, we need to be able to give, most of us, if we can talk to a family, can give them that cone of probabilities, and give them sense of where it’s going to land. Those schools, again, that have the resources, both on the K-12 side, for the advising and support and on our side, have been working with these folks. And so, they know what these ranges are. It’s just a question of which piece of the Rubik’s cube gets turned to make it whole. There’s not a lot of options left.

But for those families, and again, with the FAFSA situation, it’s those families in need most of certainty, in need most of information, that haven’t had these privileges, is exactly who’s now missing the information and will need to make a hurried decision. And I think from the families that I saw, those folks in that situation, they may not make a decision. And it’s going to be a national undermatch.

[00:18:13] Gil: Yeah, yeah. And I think there’s a little bit of irony to wat you said about how the families whose data was, I guess, most clinically compromised, I’ll use the best word, with the miscalculations were likely the families with lowest level of need.

But now, this issue that’s been the delays and all the, you know, glitches and everything else is negatively impacting first-time lower-income students who are in, in need. And so, even when the families who are in less need are the ones their data is impacted, that’s still going to negatively impact the have-nots to many extent, right? And I think that’s one of the biggest challenges.

And I think the hardest part, and this is where I have so much empathy for the families who are impacted in this process, is that even if every institution sent them a uniform, they got a table where they could just compare, let’s pretend there’s a world where they just get one table that’s unified and consistent across all the schools they’ve been admitted to, and it just has side-by-sides, but they’re all estimates and could change, they still can’t make a final, final decision until they actually have the final results because those schools that are close, they, like you said, they might undermatch based on the fact that they are more comfortable with how it’s positioned, right?

And so, everything becomes now a marketing problem. And that’s the challenge that a lot of institutions are cross-referencing with themselves is supporting students, but also still marketing to them and keeping them engaged in this process. And because at the end of the day, there are still more institutions that need to get the work out there to get those enrollments in than the ones that can be okay if they lose a few because the financial aid process was messed up for them, right? And so, it’s a challenging process.

[00:19:45] Joel: It is a challenging problem. You know, the further irony on this version of what else can go wrong, it is the same year that there’s all this murkiness for students and confusion where we’re about to implement the Financial Value Transparency Act, which is designed to your point about a universal, you know, spreadsheet to give families as much transparency and information on the financial value of the education and availability of financial aid to make informed decisions.

So, there are multiple ironies here. And I don’t know that there’ll be a reckoning. I don’t. I think everybody is, sort of, aware of, boy, it’s complicated. All kidding aside, really complicated. Six, eight months from now, there will be many more people eligible for Pell. And that’s going to be a good thing. It will be a much easier FAFSA to fill out. I filled it out this year. I did notice a difference.

And that’s a good thing. But much like the COVID echo, you know, have we just missed this year of families that are dealing with this and the issues with the technology? Like, will it echo through the next… you know. Is this now a generational impact? Just like COVID and learning, is this now a generational impact that we, as an industry, need to address, right?

So, all of us are going to have FAFSA nights, and all of us are going to go out and message about how important it is, but how is it okay for families to get… you know, how many schools are going to do search and buy that particular name and send them stuff about fill out the FAFSA, right? So, 50, 60, 300 separate emails about a FAFSA versus a unified, organized, more efficient approach that all of us don’t have to spend the exact same, sort of, resources multiple times?

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[00:22:28] Gil: So, I think that, you know, you just brought up a really good point. And this will be my last, kind of, segue through all this thing. But remember back in the day, it was the American Dairy Farmers Association did the advertising campaign, the Got Milk? campaign, right? And it was like, it wasn’t one milk company that paid to have that campaign run nationwide to get people to buy and drink more milk.

It was everybody, kind of, paid in to this campaign to raise awareness because they understood that a rising tide raises all ships, right? And so, I think there’s a certain, like, we’ll go back to what you mentioned earlier, we have our national associations that are all encouraging institutions to do certain things. What if those associations did a national campaign of some kind to encourage families and students to… Is that collusion?

I don’t think it is if the association is doing it and everybody pays in through that way. And that might be a smarter way, like you said, versus going out and buying 20,000 names and doing an email blast to try to get and… And again, the messaging is going to be all different, the positioning is going to be all different, versus that unified approach. Maybe a crazy idea.

[00:23:33] Joel: You used the word positioning. So, if I put my positioning hat, I’m going to say, and to all my colleagues out there who’ve ever had a FAFSA night or financial aid webinar, we can position that to identify all the distinctives and signature programs that are unique to Duquesne University education and how we address the financial aid process.

Having said that, I’d love that opportunity versus having to just, to your analogy, do we have FAFSA? You got FAFSA? That, I think, would be where the Department of Education, as part of that 50-million concierge service, they could do a service to the whole industry and say, “We have a FAFSA night. We’re a neutral party. We have reach that nobody else does. We have access to information that nobody else does. And we could leverage just to those families and in those spots that need the most help.”

And then, right, that’s neutral territory, then we can all go in and say, “Now that everybody’s got base level, let’s talk about what’s unique about our institution.” That would be fantastic, where we can be individualized and serve the students that we serve. And with our mission, I mean, obviously, Duquesne has a Catholic mission and the spirit in identity, the only spirit in university, in North America.

So, we have a certain way of talking about how we approach financial aid and how we finance and how we serve students and particular kinds of families, right, those on the margins. So, you know, that’s where we need to be spending our time. And that’s the impact.

Again, the situation impacts our ability to serve our students in the best way possible, to get our story out, while we’re backtracking and have to do some of the basic work. And by the way, we’re a pretty good-resourced institution. So, you know, I think our endowment is up to 600 million at this point. So, I get the privilege that we’re at and the resources that we can bring to bear. And yet, there’s those that can do more and those that can’t that we’d love to help.

[00:25:28] Gil: Yeah, that’s a great point that I don’t think the responsibility should fall on higher ed institutions to encourage students to file the FAFSA. It should, especially in this cycle, that PR and marketing campaign should presumably be taken on by the government at this point based on, kind of, the impact that the rollout glitches, the timing, and the delays have had on this, so anything that can be done to broaden that reach and broaden that message so you’re getting that.

And then it’s just a matter of do they send you their FAFSA versus not, right? And so, I think that’s the piece. But you’ve got the information on the students you need FAFSAs from. And so, there’s a certain element there, at least for this cycle. And I know we can go down a whole rabbit hole of students who send the FAFSA who hadn’t applied yet and how you handle that in the process.

Those are separate conversations and issues, but at least for the students who you’ve admitted to the institution for this fall, you have their information, right, to contact and ensure that they do, but it’s a matter of getting them to actually fill out the damn form, right, is the important piece.

So, Joel, I appreciate all of your time this afternoon. And congratulations on the team’s performance in the tournament. And we hope that you have a great rest of your week. Any closing thoughts and best ways for people to get in touch with you if they want to continue the conversation?

[00:26:40] Joel: Yeah. Closing thoughts are let’s get out there and support the women’s basketball team who’s in the second round of the NIT. So, we’re going to be pretty busy and excited about rooting our teams.

But yeah, I think from my experience of, you know, the face to face with the families, right now, the takeaway is be very aware as you work with these arcane and complicated systems that your staff, our people, your financial aid staff, especially, and I want to shout out to them, who are working really hard and with limited staffing.

And I also want to suggest that the admissions offices around, and I’m sure we’re not the only one, the admission staff has jumped in and learning as much as they can about financial aid to help with the overlap and help support the team and then the families themselves. So, I just think a giant dose of empathy and attention to the people we have on campus and at the other end of the Zoom or phone, just to remember that and start with that, and then go to that next step as we work through the actual technical system.[00:27:42] Gil: Awesome. Well, Joel, we appreciate your time again. And we’ll put all of the appropriate links for our listeners in the episode notes. And we will see you all next time on FYI. Thanks.

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