After the FAFSA debacle, a silver lining: community college

Two-year programs offer a chance for low-income students to

plan for a four-year university.

Most likely you’ve heard that the Free Application for Federal Student

Aid (FAFSA) is a disaster this year. Meant to be new and improved, it’s new,

but no one would argue it’s improved. We wrote about this in February. It’s

gotten worse since.

FAFSA is the path for low to middle-income and first-generation students to

access federal grants and loans with the hope of earning a college degree. It

can be a ticket out of poverty. Texas has the fastest-growing job market

alongside the fastest growth in poverty in the country, so you can see why this

is important for all of us.

The flaws in the new FAFSA are evident in the sharp drop in application

submissions and completions. According to the National College Attainment

Network, FAFSA completions are down 40% nationally in 2024 from 2023.

Texas is slightly better, down 38% year over year.

Worse still is bad timing. In prior years, colleges would have received

completed FAFSA results in January, allowing them to make financial offers to

potential students in May. This year, FAFSA started returning results in late

March, meaning colleges won’t finish making financial offers until early or

mid-July. That’s too late for students to properly plan a four-year journey they

hope to start in August.

The silver lining to this fiasco is that it underscores the wisdom of making a

community college start, rather than jumping immediately to a four-year

school that could prove too expensive. There are several reasons why this

makes sense. Let’s look at two of them.

You may have guessed the first reason is financial. At ScholarShot, a Dallas-

based nonprofit college completion program, we see hundreds of high school

seniors each year planning to attend public Texas universities. We look at their

university financial offers — based on FAFSA — and typically see $12,000 and

$7,000 respectively in public grants and loans.

We ask these students, how much does your university cost? They often don’t

know, but suppose it’s $19,000, because “that’s what my school offered.” As a

voice of reality, ScholarShot explains their school’s total cost of attendance is

$29,000 and asks, “How are you going to cover that?” Most of their FAFSAs

show they have zero or near zero dollars in family contributions. Sadly, this is

the first time they’ve been asked this question.

The second reason is academic. A typical Dallas County high school senior’s

SAT score is in the 950 range. Dallas ISD reports their average is 927. At

Dallas College, the remedial level is 1080, below which every student must

take remedial reading or math. The average SAT score for enrolling at Texas

A&M or the University of Texas is 1300, putting the average Dallas County

high school senior at a 27% deficit. However, because of class rank, they are

granted a four-year seat at a school where remedial courses are no longer

offered.

Students take the same core courses in their first two years at community

college as in four-year schools, and at less than one-third the cost. For Dallas

County high school graduates, Dallas College is free thanks to Dallas County

Promise. Why not start the majority of these kids there so they can earn an

associate’s degree, satisfy remediation and transfer as juniors to a four-year

school with no debt?

According to the Texas Higher Education Board, more than half the Texas kids

enrolling in four-year schools drop out, with only 22% of our high school

graduates succeeding in earning any degree. We could more than double that

completion rate taking advantage of a two-year start.

This year is a chance for the well-meaning advisors and voices in high school

to do what’s right for their students.