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Meeting students’ basic needs, such as food security, is becoming a growing focus for colleges and universities.
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A growing body of research has shown that student persistence and college completion are strongly connected to and determined by whether students’ basic needs are being met. But college administrators are hamstrung by insufficient funding to fully address basic needs insecurity on their campuses and help students in a comprehensive way.
A new policy brief by Higher Learning Advocates (HLA), a nonpartisan research organization, and the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA), says that although state and federal higher education funding alone is not enough to meet those needs, “millions of college students” could be better helped with existing government assistance programs for which they qualify but are unaware of their eligibility—or even how to apply for the benefits.
“One solution is to ensure students access all available financial support, including means-tested public benefits such as SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), subsidized health insurance, broadband assistance, and tax credits,” the brief states.
The brief, released earlier this month, argues that college administrators should leverage pre-existing data from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, completed by millions of students annually, to inform them of their eligibility for the various benefits and help them apply.
The brief was based on an analysis of how colleges are using FAFSA data to alert students of their potential eligibility for benefits.
For example, data from the U.S. Government Accountability Office shows roughly two million of the approximately 3.3 million students who are eligible for SNAP benefits aren’t participating, which translates to $3 billion in unused benefits.
“What’s really beneficial about using FAFSA data is that it’s more targeted,” said Amy Ellen Duke-Benfield, HLA’s managing director of policy and research. “Papering your school with signs that say ‘you might be eligible for SNAP’ is not as effective as sending an email or a text to a student and letting them know that they are likely eligible.”
HLA is not the first organization to make this argument. The Biden administration provided initial guidance on how colleges could best use FAFSA data to help students access public social welfare benefits in a Dear Colleague letter released by the U.S. Department of Education in January 2022.
The HLA brief contends that the guidance was only effective if colleges and universities actually put the recommendations into effect. A March 2023 survey of 359 college financial aid officers indicates that hasn’t necessarily been the case.
Just over a quarter of the financial aid offices surveyed (27 percent) were conducting direct outreach to students about any public benefit programs, whether through targeted FAFSA-based notifications to individual students or wider outreach campaigns. Eighteen percent of survey respondents said they planned to do such outreach in the future. Almost half (43 percent) of the respondents said they weren’t planning to flag students who qualify for public benefits.
“We have a lot of work to do to make sure student basic needs are addressed in the financial aid process,” said Bryce McKibben, senior director of policy at Temple University’s Hope Center for College, Community and Justice, a student equity research center.
A few assistance programs, including SNAP and the Affordable Connectivity Program, which provides broadband access, had high rates of direct outreach to students based on FAFSA data (85 percent and 64 percent respectively). But fewer than one in five of the colleges were providing any notification to students about any other benefits, such as those provided through the Affordable Care Act or the Child Tax Credit.
McKibben partly attributes the “surprisingly” low number of institutions using FAFSA data to do outreach to capacity issues.
“It’s a little bit a function of financial aid offices being incredibly overwhelmed,” he said. “Right now, we know that they’re facing a complicated FAFSA rollout period and have significant staffing shortages.”
NASFAA data indicate approximately half of the nation’s financial aid departments are understaffed.
Jill Desjean, senior policy analyst at NASFAA, said for many of the survey respondents, resource constraints are a major challenge.
“Since the pandemic, we really never bounced back to full staffing,” she said. “When you’re already working overtime to do the minimum that your office has to do, it’s obviously really difficult to take on additional initiatives, as much as financial aid officers appreciate that they would be valuable to their students.”
She said the recent announcement of yet another delay of the release of this year’s FAFSA data further complicates the situation.
“Those resource constraints were real before, but now in the past couple of months they are exceptional,” she said.
Duke-Benfield, of HLA, however, noted that conversations with financial aid administrators indicated that analyzing FAFSA data was not highly time-consuming and was worth the time investment.
“If you invest in connections up front, then you don’t have to go back and re-enroll those students after they drop out or help them rectify their satisfactory academic progress,” which ensures they qualify for aid, she said.
She also said financial aid departments should be able to pass the data along to social services and student support staff to actually execute the outreach. But some respondents voiced concern about violating the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which limits access to students’ financial and educational records.
The policy brief calls on the Department of Education to allow colleges to request students’ permission to share FAFSA data as early as possible, to clarify guidelines on data sharing and provide training on best welfare outreach practices over all.
McKibben believes these policy adjustments would allow financial aid departments to spread the workload among other departments and staff and establish clear outreach protocols for state higher education agencies.
He noted that some states, including California, have already implemented policies to notify students who might be eligible for benefits, but many others have hesitated to take action.
“We have thousands and thousands of institutions across the country, and asking each of them to reinvent the wheel in the way that they do outreaches is a tall order,” McKibben said. But the most efficient way to address this is through the state. “So it’s critical that the Department of Education clarify and update its guidance.”
