Black Hills State fights FAFSA struggles

RAPID CITY, S.D. (KEVN) - Students at Black Hills State University are beginning to work out their FAFSA forms after the Department of Education decided to revise the process back in late December.

Tirzah Knight, the Director of Student Financial Aid, said, “This was the first time in about 40 years that the Department of Education has overhauled, not only, the FAFSA form but also their processing system and so with that there were just delays in getting all their pieces set up and there were pieces with changes with our software vendors and so students weren’t able to get in and complete the FAFSA in the time that they usually do and then we didn’t get the data and we didn’t get aid offers out in the normal time frame we are used to.”

According to the Department of Education, one of the major issues came from a program incorrectly calculating the Student Aid Index, requiring many forms to be reprocessed.

“It made it hard for students because those incoming students that were trying to make decisions for college didn’t have the financial data to compare aid offers from other schools,” Knight continued.

The university was dependent on the federal government to fix the problem as the issue arose on the federal level, but they tried to communicate with students about the issue.

“There are some hearings that they are doing in like Washington D.C. to look at where the rollout didn’t go as smoothly as planned and financial aid experts along with Department of Education staff have been in those and so looking at what we can do differently where the issues were.”

Black Hills State encourages all students, regardless of their family’s income, to complete the FAFSA forms as soon as possible to avoid future problems regarding financial aid. For more information regarding financial aid at BHSU, click here.

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