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Advocacy group says FAFSA glitches hurt Arizona students with undocumented parents

The 2024-2025 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA)
Tim Agne/KJZZ
The 2024-2025 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form.

A revamped version of FAFSA — the federal form students use to apply for college loans and grants — has caused problems for students across the country, including those from families with mixed immigration status.

The amount of funding a student can receive through FAFSA is determined by their household income, and all students who are U.S. citizens are eligible — including those with undocumented parents.

But the new online form changes how parents input information like tax documents. José Patiño, vice president of education and external affairs with the immigrant advocacy group Aliento, says that’s where trouble started for mixed immigration status families.

“Sometimes parents cannot create the account because as they put information there are no records that the system fills up,” he said. “And then the second one is once they were able to actually create the account, it was not linking the student to the parent.”

Patiño says these glitches could have impacted 12,000 Arizona students — that’s the number of students Aliento estimates live with at least one undocumented parent.

A workaround now has students and parents print out a portion of the application and mail it in. But Patiño says the process can take weeks.

“The biggest thing we worry about is that a lot of students, specifically this year, did not complete the process, because it was just too much for their families,” he said.

Data from earlier this year placed Arizona last in the country for FAFSA completion. Patiño says federal funding and support from Governor Katie Hobbs has helped push the state a few places up from that low point, but more work is still needed.

The revamped version of FAFSA was supposed to help streamline the process, but Patiño says some changes — like one that has parents input tax documents and other financial information into their own, separate FAFSA account, hurt some families instead.

“If you live with somebody who is undocumented or your parents are not the most savvy financially, which typically are working families or low-income communities, that’s going to be the biggest challenge,” Patiño said. “It’ s heartbreaking, because the whole goal of Aliento and other organizations is to support these low income communities get a college education, but at the end of the day, the system that’s created by the federal government is hurting these communities.”

Alisa Reznick is a senior field correspondent covering stories across southern Arizona and the borderlands for the Tucson bureau of KJZZ's Fronteras Desk.
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