A FAFSA of Their Own

Inside Higher Ed

Liam Knox

Tom Delahunt was fed up with waiting.

Already stressed over the rocky rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, the vice president for strategic recruitment and enrollment at Southwestern University knew he couldn’t sit tight any longer after the Education Department’s latest and most disruptive delay early this month. So he took matters into his own hands.

Delahunt and his team drew up their own formula mimicking the new Student Aid Index calculations and sent out a makeshift financial aid estimate form to admitted students last week. In the first 48 hours, they received 80 completed forms, and they have begun calculating their best approximations of student aid packages.

“We had been talking about doing this for a few months, but that [Institutional Student Information Record delay] was really the last straw,” Delahunt said. “Part of this, of course, is so the university can speed up this already-stalled process. But it’s mainly for the families and the students that are in this situation trying to make an informed financial decision on a really stressful timeline.”

The Education Department has made some progress since the ISIR delay was announced. On Friday the department began sending test ISIRs to colleges, meeting the timeline for additional support laid out in early February. But for many colleges that delay was a sign that they had to step in to help prospective students—or risk losing them.

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