Many low-income families find federal student-aid documents complicated and intimidating, and never make it through the first step on the path to college. But what if they got free help in filling out the forms, wondered Nathan J. Daun-Barnett, at the University at Buffalo. Would that make a difference?
It appears so. In many large urban school districts, only a little more than a third of graduating seniors successfully complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa. But Mr. Daun-Barnett is working to turn those numbers around in the Buffalo, N.Y., public-school system, where more than three-quarters of students qualify for lunch subsidies. The Fafsa project sends undergraduate and graduate students from the university to 15 public schools and five charter schools to work directly with graduating seniors and their parents to complete the aid form.
In 2013, the project—started by Mr. Daun-Barnett in 2011—led to a 61-percent increase in the number of students from 14 public high schools in Buffalo who completed the Fafsa. It is also credited with raising the system’s college-going rate.
Hector Berrios, a senior at Buffalo's Bennett High School, typifies the challenges facing urban students. He recently left the home that he had shared with his mother to move in with his brother. When he first went online to fill out the Fafsa, he was able to create an identification number and enter some personal information. But he hit a roadblock when the form asked for his parents' income.
Mr. Daun-Barnett, an assistant professor of higher-education administration in the university's Graduate School of Education, regularly volunteers at Bennett. He arranged to meet with the student and his mother at the high school, and they worked through the form’s questions about income. "There were a lot of questions," Mr. Berrios recalls. "He helped us step-by-step to understand what the questions were asking."
Mr. Berrios plans to attend Niagara County Community College in the fall, and hopes eventually to earn a four-year degree in graphic design.
Student-privacy issues may have contributed to the problem of low Fafsa-completion rates in the past. The U.S. Department of Education, which sees the low rates as a barrier to the Obama administration's goal of sharply raising the number of students who earn college degrees, has become much more open recently about sharing individual student data with states and school districts willing to sign confidentiality agreements. The department is sharing information with 90 districts, including Buffalo, in a continuing pilot study, which started in 2012-13. President Obama announced in March that the department was open to sharing student-specific information with all of the states by 2015.
The data allow districts to see in real time which students have successfully filed the form. Then it's up to districts and schools to work with students who are stumbling. "Just because you have data doesn't mean that anything will change—you have to have an action plan," says Greg Darnieder, a senior adviser to Education Secretary Arne Duncan. "We're asking school counselors to put on their organizing hats and find volunteers to sit down with kids and help them fill out the Fafsa."
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/Clearing-a-Path-to-College/146721