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San Antonio nonprofit: It’s not too late for students to fill out FAFSA and go to college this fall

The exterior of Cafe College in downtown San Antonio, which is run by the San Antonio Education Partnership.
Camille Phillips
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TPR
The City of San Antonio provides the funding for the San Antonio Education Partnership to run Cafe College, a one-stop shop for free help navigating the college application process.

The number of students who’ve applied for federal financial aid for college continues to lag significantly compared to prior years.

The roll out of the new FAFSA form caused major delays and obstacles for students to overcome, and San Antonio is faring worse than other parts of Texas and the country.

But according to a San Antonio nonprofit with the mission to bridge the gap between high school and college, there’s still a narrow window of time to fill out the form and get help paying for college this fall.

“If you do it right away, right now you are not too late. And you can still attend,” said Ana Acevedo, executive director of the San Antonio Education Partnership.

She said institutions with rolling admission, like the Alamo Colleges District, are the most likely to still be accessible at this late date, but universities where students have already been accepted are probably still an option too.

“Many students already have been accepted maybe to UTSA, or Our Lady of the Lake, or Incarnate Word, or Texas A&M-San Antonio. And those acceptances are still valid, and they still want to see you on campus,” Acevedo added.

However, in order to access federal financial aid for this semester, Acevedo said colleges need to have a student’s financial information before tuition bills go out.

“We're heading into August — start dates are upon us. And that's why there's critical urgency to do this,” Acevedo said.

A young man sits in a waiting area facing a sign that says Cafe College.
Camille Phillips
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TPR
San Antonians wanting help with FAFSA or other parts of the college application process can walk in during business hours and wait for the next advisor to be free.

The National College Attainment Network tracks how many high school graduates fill out FAFSA each year, and the numbers are dim in San Antonio. Altogether, there’s been about a 14% drop in FAFA applications among graduates of San Antonio school districts. But some high schools lag even further behind. There’s a 32% drop at Taft High School and a 37% drop at South San.

“What that translates to is about 2,800 graduating seniors [in San Antonio] who should still be doing a FAFSA just to keep up with the current the rate that we had last year,” Acevedo explained.

Applications are down 11% in Texas and 10% nationwide. But because San Antonio has fewer college graduates than other cities, Acevedo said the challenges created by the glitches in the FAFSA website are harder to overcome.

Education advocates in San Antonio have a goal of enrolling 70% of high school graduates in some form of post-secondary credential by 2030, but right now only about 50% go. Acevedo is worried the problems with FAFSA could delay progress.

“This impact is felt not only by individuals and their families, but it actually also ends up hurting our whole community, our economy, when we don't have higher levels of educational attainment,” Acevedo said.

“When I say that 2,800 less students may be going to college, that's already looking at whatever the previous enrollment was, that's still not at 70%. We still have a long way to go in helping our students get to college directly from high school.”

The San Antonio Education Partnership runs Café College, a city-funded center where San Antonians can walk in and get free help navigating the college process, from filling out the FAFSA to preparing for the ACT. SAEP also provides scholarships to thousands of local students and places college advisors on high school campuses.

A young woman in a green shirt and jeans sits at a desk.
Camille Phillips
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TPR
Aide Garcia is a San Antonio Education Partnership college advisor. She worked with high school students at LEE, ISA, Churchill, Marshall and Taft during the 2023-2024 school year.

Aide Garcia worked as a SAEP college advisor at two North East and two Northside schools this year: LEE and ISA, Churchill, Marshall, and Taft. She saw firsthand how difficult it was for students to navigate the new FAFSA form.

“It really hurt the kids,” Garcia said. “They turned in their forms, they were doing everything they needed to. However, they had a lot of blockage from the website itself.”

“That also caused a lot of kids not to go through with filling out the form and just giving up on it. And a lot of kids not wanting to go to college, just because they knew that … they wouldn't be able to afford college without financial aid.”

Garcia said she’s concerned there will be fewer students going to college in San Antonio this year because of the FAFSA rollout. “You can encourage as much as you want, but the truth is, some kids really do need that financial aid to go to college,” she explained.

When the FAFSA form failed, the one silver lining Garcia could offer her students was the promise of Promise scholarships, especially Alamo PROMISE, because every student who graduates from Bexar County qualifies no matter their income.

“If you don't get financial aid, you have this other option,” she told her students.

Garcia said she had that same conversation about local Promise scholarship programs with students a least once a week at every high school she visited. “That really did turn it around for them a bit,” she said.

But even local Promise programs require students to fill out the FAFSA. So, if students were unsuccessful in navigating the form before, Acevedo said now is the time to come back and try again.

“Please let us help you,” Acevedo said. “We've seen a lot of the different situations and scenarios that have happened. We've been connected to the site and to other resources that have been able to help us problem solve. Don't get discouraged. We have helped everybody through that has come through, and we will continue to help people as much as they need to get to the finish line.”

A lot of the glitches on the FAFSA website impacted families with mixed immigration status, but Acevedo said most of that’s been worked out now, and her organization knows how to help mixed status families navigate the form. They also have advisors who speak Spanish.

“Because most of the glitches have been corrected, the process can actually go pretty quickly. Once you have everything in order, it can take less than 30 minutes for a student and the parent to go through the whole FAFSA application. So in that regard, it really did cut down on the amount of questions that the prior FAFSA asked, and the process is considerably shorter when everything's working,” Acevedo said.

The new form pulls in tax information from the IRS. But Acevedo said that can also cause problems if the name the IRS has on record differs in any way from the way you enter it when you create your user ID, or if the way a student enters their parent’s name differs from the way the parent enters it, now that they have to have separate IDs.

“And that can be problematic if somebody uses a different last name, or sometimes people have two last names. Or maybe they put their first name, and they spell it differently, or they put the short version, but then their ID has it a different way,” Acevedo said. “So, there are some times those kinds of glitches that happen, that we can help resolve as well, we can kind of drill down and then figure out where the discrepancy is.”

San Antonians can get free help filling out FAFSA at Café College at 131 El Paso St. from Tuesday to Thursday, from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., and then from Friday to Saturday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The San Antonio Education Partnership is also hosting a free FAFSA workshop on Friday, Aug. 2, at the Shops at La Cantera from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. at the Capital One Café.

The organization also offers virtual advising from Tuesday to Friday, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Acevedo said students and their parents should bring their 2022 income and tax documents and their FAFSA usernames and passwords if they already created them.

San Antonio Education Partnership can also help Texas residents fill out the TAFSA if they don’t qualify for FAFSA because of their immigration status.

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Camille Phillips can be reached at camille@tpr.org or on Instagram at camille.m.phillips. TPR was founded by and is supported by our community. If you value our commitment to the highest standards of responsible journalism and are able to do so, please consider making your gift of support today.