03/31/2008

The question about completing the FAFSA came to Stephanie Covington barely two weeks before her college-bound son was due to apply for financial aid.

Covington responded to the query with one of her own.

"What's that?" asked Covington, a clerk in the St. Louis collector of revenue's office.

As Covington now knows, FAFSA is an acronym, educational shorthand for Free Application for Federal Student Aid, the form used by colleges, financial institutions and governmental agencies to gauge financial assistance the various institutions award to qualified students.

On Thursday morning, Covington and her son Errol Isom sat down with an outside educational consultant in a Vashon High School guidance office to grapple with the answers to an even more perplexing question: How does someone navigate a form as complex as anything the Internal Revenue Service has to offer?

Unlike Covington, it's a process many parents who are confronting the higher education system for the first time choose to ignore.

The labyrinthine FAFSA application, experts say, is one reason low-income parents or parents intimidated by the process procrastinate or completely balk at the prospect of disclosing personal financial information.

"It's a daunting form, it's a barrier," said Marcia Weston, the Director of College Access Programs for the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators in Washington. "They're confused by it, then don't know what will happen if they put certain information into it. It's a new process to them."

'MATTER OF TRUST'

The FAFSA form, Farmer and others say, is just a single stumbling block for poor parents.

From there, the list becomes more personal for such parents, running through embarrassment and humiliation for having to disclose they receive public assistance, hesitation to reveal undeclared income and apprehension about financial, governmental and educational institutions.

"In black communities, it's often a matter of trust," said Wanda Garner, a Vashon guidance counselor.

Whatever the explanation, experts say parental procrastination or outright refusal to complete the FAFSA application hampers access to higher education by low-income students.

"It's definitely a hindrance," said Stephen Farmer, assistant provost and director of undergraduate admission at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "We can't help people if we can't verify their income."

A study on college access released this month by the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago bears that out. The consortium, which conducts ongoing research on children attending the Chicago Public Schools, reports that students who complete the FAFSA in a timely manner are 50 percent more likely to enroll in a four-year college than those students who neglected to submit the form.

Those findings dovetail with a 2003 survey, conducted by Harris Interactive for The Sallie Mae Fund — the student loan provider.

The Sallie Mae survey found that nearly half of parents earning under $25,000 a year had "no idea" how to finance their children's college education.

HIGH-TECH DISCONNECT

Tommie Bonner is the educational counselor who walked Covington and Errol Isom through the FAFSA application Thursday morning.

A counselor with Educational Talent Search, a publicly financed organization providing assistance to underperforming schools, Bonner has advised parents and students on college-related financial matters over the past 10 years in high schools across the city.

A portion of the disconnect between FAFSA and low-income families, he says, is owed to the technological divide between different income groups. "The people who administer FAFSA work on the assumption that everyone has a computer at home," he said. "As a result, they've been cutting back on paper. They're operating under the pretense that we all live in a technologically accessible society. And that's not necessarily true."

Parents who neither assume nor expect their children will one day become the first in their family to attend college also contribute to the FAFSA intimidation factor and, with it, the college access gap, said Stacy Clay, the St. Louis Public Schools program director of College Summit, the nationally recognized organization that has made immense strides increasing college access for students in the city schools.

"It (FAFSA) is a difficult thing for us versed in it. But for people not versed in the system, it's extremely difficult," Clay said.

DEADLINE NEAR

Garner, the Vashon counselor, tells the story of the student whose admission last year to a major out-state public university was stopped in its tracks by a mother intimidated and distrustful of the FAFSA form.

The mother's refusal to disclose her financial data, Garner said, forced the student to instead further her education locally.

Farmer and others in the field say one-on-one counseling — in the manner of Bonner and Covington — is the best, if not the only way, to erase the various obstacles posed by FAFSA.

Schools across the country, including the University of North Carolina and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, are moving in that direction.

"We spend as much time as we can to allay their fears and show them that they need to apply in order to get all the aid they can," said Sharon Berry, director of financial aid at SIUE.

For scores of students' parents, though, the time to reach out for help is about up.

The deadline for FAFSA applications in Missouri is April 1. In Illinois, the deadline was in the fall.

Bonner says the Missouri deadline is hard and fast for students who hope to qualify for federal assistance, but flexible for students seeking aid from individual colleges and state sources.

Even so, the clock is ticking at schools like Roosevelt High School, where, of the 140 College Summit students who have received letters of acceptance, only 14 have completed their FAFSA forms.

Some blame themselves. Others, their parents.

"They really haven't gone through this yet," said Roosevelt senior Doug Kearns.

Until Thursday, neither had Stephanie Covington.

Once she learned what FAFSA is and what it means, however, she quickly made an appointment, through Wanda Garner, to meet with Tommie Bonner.

"It's a whole bunch of stuff I don't know a lot about," Covington said. "But you have to do it if you want your child to get some of the money that's out there."

sgiegerich@post-dispatch.com | 314-340-8172