Colleges Still Waiting to Send Aid Offers
Liam Knox
April 22, 2024
With less than two weeks until the typical May 1 commitment deadline, only 34 percent of colleges have started sending financial aid offers to accepted students, according to new survey data from the National Association for Student Financial Aid Advisers (NASFAA); 54 percent had not begun packaging offers at all.
The survey also found that 29 percent of colleges are waiting to receive reprocessed Institutional Student Information Records, or ISIRs, before starting the packaging process. Last week, the Department of Education said it had begun reprocessing the nearly half a million forms affected by various errors and miscalculations, but that it could take several more weeks to finish.
The department has told colleges they can use incorrect ISIRs to package student aid offers if those forms reflect a higher student aid index than the accurate forms, in order to speed up the process. But the NASFAA survey found that only 10 percent will take this option; another 18 percent will process all the ISIRs they receive and then repackage them later.
