Parents are out of work. Should student loan requirements change due to coronavirus?
Typically, a student’s eligibility for college loans or grants depends on a family’s tax filings from previous years. But should that change given the huge number of people driven to unemployment by the coronavirus pandemic?
California Rep. Josh Harder, D-Turlock, thinks so, and is writing to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos asking her to direct financial aid administrators to be more flexible in how they calculate household income this year.
The Free Application for Student Aid (FAFSA) uses a family’s tax filings from the previous year to estimate what a household can contribute to a student’s college tuition. It uses that calculation to award certain amounts of grants and loans to the student. Households with lower income qualify for more help.
The real unemployment rate at this point is somewhere around 20 percent, according to some financial estimates, up from 3.5 percent at the end of February, before COVID-19 was widespread in the U.S. Somewhere around 33 million people in the U.S. are now unemployed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That means a huge portion of Americans have had a significant change in income since February, and many are likely to struggle to find work while parts of the economy remain shut down and even after businesses reopen.
“We’re at the highest unemployment since the Depression – obviously a lot of families’ budgets will look different now than they did last year,” Harder said. “We need the federal government to account for that and make sure our families can afford to keep our kids in school.”
Harder asked DeVos to clarify to financial aid administrators that they can use a process called “professional judgment” to “make necessary adjustments to a student’s FAFSA application” to accurately calculate what the household can contribute.
That decision is mostly up to universities, which can have aid officers meet with students to discuss more specifics. Students can also request to amend their applications with more up-to-date information, but many don’t know that.
Harder asked DeVos to explain that process to students on the Department of Education’s COVID-19 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page, clarify to colleges, universities and students that they can use the alternate process and provide additional training on the process to financial aid administrators.
“By making the professional judgement disclaimer more widely known, students will be able to advocate for themselves, and ensure that they will get their financial aid needs met to continue on with their educational journey,” said Aurelia Gonzalez, interim director of Student Financial Aid Services at Modesto Junior College.
The Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment on whether it was considering any of these steps related to FAFSA.
This story was originally published April 29, 2020 at 3:30 PM with the headline "Parents are out of work. Should student loan requirements change due to coronavirus?."
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