Immigration policies drawing blame for fewer high school seniors applying for financial aid

Also down dramatically is the share of students applying who have at least one parent who’s undocumented: That number has plunged 44% so far this year compared to this point last year — from about 30,000 students then to 17,000 now.

The early data comes from the California Student Aid Commission, the state agency that handles financial aid. This morning the commission will hold a webinar with high school counselors regarding the implications of this decline and how to encourage more students to apply for aid.

The Trump administration has not announced plans to use application information to target people for deportation.

“This is very alarming,” said Daisy Gonzales, executive director of the commission, in an interview about the application declines. “It’s a crisis in the sense that we have a perfect storm.” The White House’s accelerated deportation campaign, the fires in Southern California that displaced thousands of families and burned down some schools, plus students’ ongoing scrutiny of the value of a college education are all forces that Gonzales says may be behind the drop.

If the trend of fewer applications holds, she fears that “we’re losing another generation of students who should be enrolling, who should be succeeding.”

The commission has extended the deadline for state aid to April 2 for students in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, where much of the destructive winter fires occurred.

State, FAFSA issues aren’t new

College aid experts warned last fall that families with undocumented members living in the U.S. were questioning the safety of the data. Leading associations of college advisors told students to consider opting out of FAFSA to protect their loved ones. While current law limits student and family information entered in the application for only financial aid purposes, legal experts told CalMatters those rules could change under a presidency like Donald Trump’s. Some students with undocumented parents are specifically suspicious of a line in the application for parents asking them if they have a Social Security number and a prompt to complete an identity verification form.

Gonzales has attended financial aid fairs the commission sponsors and heard from families about their FAFSA fears. “The number one question that they would ask me is, ‘Is it safe for me to apply, and what are my options?’” she said.

While the FAFSA is a federal application, California has its own state application that the student aid commission stresses is not shared with federal agencies. It’s called the California Dream Act Application, known as CADAA. Legal experts told CalMatters that federal agencies would have to clear a high legal bar to access those state records.

The CADAA gives students access to state tuition waivers and several thousand dollars in other grants, but FAFSA is the only way for students to also receive federal student loans and the Pell grant, which can yield more than $7,000 a year for low-income students.

Originally meant for undocumented students, the state application last year was expanded to permit students with a parent who wasn’t a citizen to apply for state aid. The student aid commission took that step because of massive technological issues with the revamped FAFSA last year. But a senior staffer at the student aid commission told California lawmakers last year that the state application may need to take a larger role in handling student financial aid if the federal immigration climate changes — a subtle nod to Trump.

Two new state bills may help, Gonzales and other commission officials said. One would extend the state aid deadline to April 3. Another would allow more Californians to use the CADAA. Both bills are in their early stages, though the extension legislation could move quickly: Lawmakers last March rushed to extend the deadline for state grants to address that year’s tech-related federal application mishaps.

“We have examples of families who actually have chosen not to submit the FAFSA application, and have opted instead for the CADAA,” said Marcos Montes, policy director for Southern California College Attainment Network, a coalition of nonprofits that helps students apply for college and financial aid. He said that’s what counselors in the network told him who specifically work with families living in public housing.

Montes said most mixed-status families he’s encountered who are foregoing FAFSA are those applying for financial aid for the first time. They’re less familiar with the process and are more hesitant to share information with the federal government, especially if they’ve submitted few, if any, personal records to federal authorities.

“They do realize that they’re leaving financial aid money on the table,” he said.

Federal role unclear, loss of money could be steep

There are many unknowns about Trump’s plans for student financial aid data, but Montes listed several new developments that he and his college access colleagues find concerning. One is billionaire Elon Musk’s group, called Department of Government Efficiency, that reportedly gained access to student loan records. Last week the undergraduate student association of the University of California sued the Trump administration to halt Musk’s group’s access to student financial aid files. In response, the U.S. Department of Education on Wednesday said it would temporarily block Musk’s group from accessing those files, a move the federal judge overseeing the case approved. That deal will last until at least Feb. 17.

Another worry is that the federal Department of Homeland Security, which includes immigration enforcement agencies, has asked officials at the Internal Revenue Service for help removing individuals who are in the country illegally, The Washington Post reported this week. It’s another indication of how immigration enforcement is pairing with outside agencies, Montes said.

For students who’ve already applied for federal financial aid in past years or whose parents have submitted tax returns, the federal government already has their information. That’s what the University of California is explaining to students.

“If your family has submitted this information in the past, it may continue to be accessible to those same government agencies,” the university wrote on a page for students. “Submission of a FAFSA, in this case, may not increase the amount of information about your family that is already accessible to the federal government. However, if your family has not had any data exchanged in these or other spaces, then submission of a FAFSA may present new information on the status of your family.”

A UC advisory group in December calculated that if every student with undocumented family members opted out of federal aid by only completing the state application, $85 million in grants alone would go unused.

“The University of California does not have the resources to backfill for $85 million in missing federal Pell Grants, much less any lost access to federal student loans or work-study,” wrote Stett Holbrook, a UC spokesperson, in a statement to CalMatters.