College costs weigh heavily on Texas students as they wait on late financial aid offers

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Tina-Rose Chipeta fiddled with a Lego set in her dorm room bed to quiet the numbers and costs bouncing in her brain. How would she stretch out her savings to get her through the end of the semester?

The 19-year-old Texas A&M sophomore learned in the thick of July that she would see a $10,000 drop in financial aid, well after she had to sign up for on-campus housing and enroll in classes. Her family had redirected the money that usually went to help her with college to pay off medical bills after her mother was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder this year.

Chipeta figured she could limit her food to one meal a day at the dining hall; maybe two meals on the days the hunger pangs drummed up against her stomach. She could skip out on the football rivalry game she had been anticipating.

“Should I sell my tickets, try and make an extra buck, just to help keep myself afloat?” she wondered and clicked a Lego piece in place. “I feel like my social life will also kind of start to deteriorate because, again, everything costs money.”

The federal government gave the FAFSA a makeover last year. The goal was to simplify the form to make it easier to fill out but the launch came with a litany of errors that initially kept students from completing it. Those errors delayed financial aid awards this year, forcing students to make decisions about their education without a complete picture of how much they would receive and by when.

The delays also exacerbated education attainment gaps between low- and higher-income students. Texas students from low-income families heavily depend on federal, state and school aid to get to and through college.

For some, going to college this year has meant taking out more debt or cutting their expenses to the bone. Others are looking for a cheaper school — or questioning whether they should go to college at all.

Chipeta said she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to afford to stay in college after the fall semester.

“All the money that I have from working this summer, that'll honestly probably be gone by maybe Halloween,” she said.

With the start of the fall semester looming, colleges have been asking students who are still waiting on their financial aid package to make partial payments or commit to a payment plan.

Returning students are typically expected to make housing plans in the spring — whether that means finding an apartment or a dorm room — because options dry up fast. If those students have to back down because of changes to their financial aid packages, they might still be liable to pay for their lease or other penalties.

Elian Nevarez, a senior studying aerospace engineering at Texas A&M, waited all summer to see if financial aid would cover his housing costs. He renewed his lease at his off-campus apartment to qualify for a discount on rent because he knew the housing options would be slim and expensive if he waited too long.

“I spent most of the summer worrying if I would even hear back before school started,” Nevarez said. “I started to believe that maybe I'll have issues actually starting class.”

Nevarez knew he’d qualify for the federal Pell Grant. But the average Pell Grant award only covers about a fifth of total costs at Texas public universities, according to a report from Trellis Strategies, which tracks postsecondary students’ needs.

Nevarez received his aid package a week before classes started. It was less than he expected but he was relieved that it would at least help with his rent.

He plans to pick up extra shifts at his on-campus job as a student bus driver to pay for his textbooks, food and car loan. He’s not sure how he’ll find the time to actually focus on school.

“How am I going to manage all this? I'm scared that classes will be difficult, but then at the exact same time, I have to be worried whether I'll be able to afford to live,” Nevarez said.

Returning students typically receive similar aid amounts every year, but there are many reasons why students could see a drop this upcoming school year. When the U.S. Department of Education revamped the FAFSA form last year, it also modified the formula that calculates aid. Students who were affected by the new form’s glitches and submitted it late were also last in line to receive Texas state grants, which most schools distribute on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Financial insecurity is one of the biggest barriers to completing college. A Trellis Foundation survey last fall found that about 71% of college students faced financial burdens and about 45% experienced food insecurity. Those burdens interfered with some students’ abilities to concentrate on school work, while others reported having to miss class because of time conflicts with their jobs, according to the survey.

Paola Torres had plans to attend Abilene Christian University, like a math teacher she admired. She grew up in Austin and wanted to make her own way in a different corner of the state.

But Torres has been running into error codes all year every time she tries to submit her FAFSA. She is still waiting for her form to be processed.

Torres remembers thinking in the spring: “If I don’t get FAFSA done in time, what am I going to do to pay my college tuition off? I might just have to go to the cheapest school.” She started looking at backup options after her grades started slipping because of the stress, she said.

Torres will start her first week of college on Monday at Austin Community College, where she qualifies for free tuition. Her first stop on campus will be the financial aid office to check in on the status of her aid package, but at least she knows her school expenses won’t be a burden on her family if the college does not have an immediate answer for her.

The financial uncertainty stirred by the FAFSA delays led many high-performing Texas students from low-income households to opt out of the selective four-year colleges they were admitted to and enroll at their local community colleges instead, college access experts said. It’s a phenomenon known as undermatching, one that happens to a certain degree every year but has compounded because of the delays.

“Rather than add an additional stressor to themselves, or the family, many [students] decided to go ahead and just continue their following year at the community college, where they felt a little more secure in being able to financially sustain that,” said Stephanie Dotson, a program manager at South Texas-based Education to Employment Partners.

Dotson helps advise high school students at 19 rural high schools across South Texas. She said students are familiar with community college options through dual credit classes. Enrolling at a community college felt like a safer option, she said.

The hurdles with the FAFSA discouraged some students who started to question whether college was the right fit for them. Confusion or changes to financial aid can also play into skepticism about the value of college.

​College advisers at Breakthrough Central Texas, which helps students become the first in their families to graduate from college, ​said some students worried about how they were going to pay for college went quiet during their meetings with them or stopped responding when advisers reached out.

Sara Urquidez with Academic Success Program, which provides college advising to low-income students in Dallas, Houston and College Station, said some of her students — facing the emotional toll of financial burdens — made rushed decisions to pull out of schools they were already enrolled in instead of reaching out to her team for support.

When students take a break from school, Urquidez said, “those kids don't usually come back because they start working, and then they get a bill, and they get another bill, and suddenly you're working full time and there's no room to go to school.”

It’s unclear how much of a blow the rollout of FAFSA — and the subsequent delays of financial award letters — will have on enrollment numbers for the 2024-25 school year. Colleges in recent years had already been struggling to recover from enrollment drops during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chipeta knows she needs a bachelor’s degree for the jobs she is eyeing in sports marketing. But if Chipeta cannot find a way to come up with the funds to stay at A&M, she worries she’ll have to drop out and find a job in a different field. As part of her back-to-school to-do list, she visited her psychiatrist and upped her dosage for anti-anxiety and depression medication.

“I don't want to drop out and then feel like I'm just letting everyone down because I'm not able to finish school,” said Chipeta, who is the first in her family to go to a four-year university. “There’s a lot of uncertainty about the future and what I am going to do if I'm not able to finish out my degree.”

Disclosure: Trellis Company and Trellis Foundation have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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