One of my favorite quotations is so delightfully complex and paradoxical that it’s often attributed to Yogi Berra, who almost certainly didn’t say it: “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.  But in practice, there is.”

In the spring of 2024, our theories and our practices are on a collision course with one another, and campus leaders have hard decisions to make.

Here’s a challenge for you: Use Google or ChatBot to try to find a college in America that brags about the fact that it is not student-centered.  You won’t have any luck, of course.  Being student-centered is sort of marketing and branding table stakes in discussions about what we value and what we practice.

The current situation with the Department of Education and the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) will test your mettle, and reveal whether your theory and your practices align.

If you haven’t heard, the result of the government’s three-year attempt at FAFSA simplification is not going well.  For the past decade or so, the FAFSA has opened in the fall of the year for students who will attend in the following fall.  It used already-completed tax forms from the prior year to eliminate the mad rush seasoned financial aid administrators had become accustomed to when the form didn’t open until January 1 and used still-unfiled tax information.

To be sure, everyone seems to believe that once the process is bug-free, it will work much better for students, parents, and financial aid administrators.  But any hope of that happening in the current year has evaporated.

This year, the form did not open until the legally mandated December 31, and even then, the rollout was fraught with errors and bugs.  The Department of Education, which had promised to send FAFSA data (in the form of ISIRs) to colleges sometime in January, pushed that delivery date to sometime in March. 

This sounds like it’s plenty of time to get the information, to load it into your systems, and to start running financial aid packages for new students to be on track to make a decision by the traditional May 1 date. 

It’s not quite that simple.  For one thing, the formula used to calculate eligibility for federal (and often, state) aid has changed, both in name and approach.  More students will be eligible for the federal Pell Grant, and more students will qualify for the maximum amount.  This alone might change the way your offices award aid.  Couple that with revised effects of business and farm values to the formula, and the elimination of the “number in college” calculation: Most financial aid professionals I’ve spoken with are going to be changing at least some aid policies.

Then, in some states (including the one where I work) state agencies are busy trying to estimate the effect of the new calculations on their programs.  It is a complex and confusing math, even before you consider that FAFSA submission rates are down.  Way down.

Sending financial aid offers to students won’t happen until you’ve completed weeks of testing the new uploads, running samples on the new routines, and ensuring that the data are accurate.  Even then, you may be making some estimates on state awards.

This means that it’s unlikely the most vulnerable and needy students will get financial aid packages in time to honor that May 1 deadline we’ve grandfathered in since the beginning of admissions time.  But even if you are lucky enough to work at an institution that can throw considerable resources at this problem, and even if the timing goes our way and you’re skilled enough to get awards to students by April 15, you should realize you’re only one part of the equation: Students might not hear from other colleges in order to make an informed choice about their best option.

Many institutions including my own have already extended that historical May 1 deadline to May 15 or even June 1.  I suspect many more will eventually follow.  Several professional associations have endorsed the idea. If you don’t change that deadline, you’re going to have some hard choices to make, which may include offering thousands of extensions to students who don’t have aid awards through no fault of their own; turning away well qualified students who can’t commit by your deadline because they don’t know if they can afford your college; living with dramatically increased summer melt from students who were forced (by your commitment to your deadline) to hedge their bets; or modifying aid awards after the official FAFSA data arrives.

But this is not an issue for financial aid, admissions, and enrollment management alone.  It goes to the heart of campus-wide, institutional leadership.  You can’t just give students another month while the housing office is pressing for confirmations and contracts.  You can’t allow all the favorable slots in new student orientation to go to those students wealthy enough to make a decision before they receive financial aid.  And you shouldn’t be enforcing deposit refund policies that are based on prior years when everything ran smoothly.  These offices all need to hear from top leadership that the theory of student-centeredness needs to be proven by practice.

To be sure, many students won’t be affected by challenges in our financial aid systems, and if they’re the ones you think of first, you need to ask how people will view your claims of student-centeredness in the future.

In some sense, this is COVID 2.0.  During that unprecedented time, America’s colleges generally operated in a way that really did put students first; that collective action made things better for everyone than they otherwise would have been (or at least as good as they could be given the circumstances.)

Just four years later, we’re faced with an operationally different, but conceptually similar challenge.  In deciding what to do, it is important to ask whether our commitment to students is as sincere as we’d like to believe ourselves.