Cal State Fullerton had to pause the processing of new Free Application for Federal Student Aid applications last Monday due to the Department of Education updating their information processing system.
According to the Director of Financial Aid Nick Valdivia, this pause does not affect students who had already applied to financial aid and it will not delay the awarding of aid for the next school year. It only affects students who have applied for FAFSA or made updates to their application after April 27.
“The current Department of Education is just getting this out at the end of April for something that goes effective July 1,” Valdivia said. “Normally, there would be a six to nine month process to put this information out so that we could plan for it.”
The Department of Education was required to make changes to the Institutional Student Information Record — which processes the FAFSA application —- because of changes to financial aid by the One Big Beautiful Bill passed last year. The bill brought changes to loans and Pell Grant eligibility, which is set to go into effect in July.
Valdivia explained that when changes are made to the ISIR format, it is usually announced six to nine months in advance. In this case, it happened two months before aid was awarded.
When the program is updated, each university and college system needs to update their own software and run tests to match the new ISIR system, which ultimately blocks each campus’ access to the information from new applications.
Student information that had been sent to schools before the ISIR update is still in the system and is not compromised.
The whole CSU system utilizes the Oracle PeopleSoft software to receive students’ information. According to Valdivia, they’ll need around six to eight weeks to properly develop an updated program that can receive the ISIR system.
Multiple other universities are facing the same issue, including the University of California system, which encouraged students to submit their applications before April 21 to prevent delays.
Valdivia explained that he has never experienced a “mid-cycle” change to the records, and that the Department of Education is required to provide ISIR updates and information earlier.
The changes made to financial aid establish that undergraduate students who receive enough aid to cover their full cost of attendance will no longer be eligible for Pell Grants. Those whose student aid index is twice the maximum Pell Grant award will not be eligible as well.
The bill also terminated the Grad PLUS Loans and limited the amount graduate students can borrow to $257,500.
“For our new students, the majority of them already have an award, so our emphasis is going to be those who haven’t gotten award yet, and the timeline for that, and maybe those who are still waiting to file their FAFSA, knowing that we won’t be able to access anything until late June,” Valdivia said.