Most days, Vanessa Cordova Ramirez wakes at 6 a.m. to care for her little brother, stroll the canine, make breakfast, and tidy up her household’s Queens house earlier than heading to high school.

She’s a planner. Otherwise, the 17-year-old says, she could not handle schoolwork, extracurriculars, two jobs, and household duties. “Life is a little hectic,” she admits.

Cordova Ramirez is in her closing semester at Williamsburg Preparatory High School, and already has acceptances from all 5 of her prime school decisions. Location – a school close to her household in New York City – was prime precedence, she says. But subsequent on the listing? Affordability. In order to make this dream come true she wants federal monetary help and scholarships.

It’s a second she’s been planning for years. But final month, when Cordova Ramirez and her mother sat down with a counselor to fill out the FAFSA, the shape that may decide how a lot help she’ll obtain, all they bought was an error message.

“They don’t have any solutions for us”

The household just isn’t alone. The rejection has been a standard error for college students with mother and father who will not be residents, says Kristin Azer, a school counselor at Williamsburg Prep. In reporting this story, NPR spoke with counselors, advocates and oldsters who reported comparable issues.

Since the shape opened in January, Azer, Cordova Ramirez, and her mother have tried to finish the net utility greater than 20 instances. Each time, they get the identical error message, directing them to a cellphone quantity for any questions.

“We’ve called the number. They don’t have any solutions for us,” Azer says. When they name, they get a recording that gives previous and outdated info. When she’s fortunate sufficient to get a dwell individual on the road, typically after ready on maintain for hours, they inform her to attempt once more later.

“Do you understand how frustrating that is?” she says. “You act like we just have all the time in the world to just sit down.”

It’s the newest in a collection of issues with the FAFSA this year. The form rolled out months late, setting schools scrambling to get monetary help packages out in time. Even with the additional time to get it appropriate, NPR reported recently on a technicality the division missed – doubtlessly costing college students virtually $2 billion.

Concerns about unhealthy recommendation

The implications of this newest drawback are enormous, stopping households from getting important entry to cash for school, and even making knowledgeable enrollment choices about how a lot a school schooling will price them.

The U.S. Education Department says it’s conscious of the error and is engaged on a repair. In the meantime, there have been troubling stories of probably dangerous workarounds – like asking college students to take pictures of their mother and father’ passports and electronic mail them to the Ed Department.

“First of all, that assumes [the parents] have one,” says Bill Short, who runs a scholarship program for first-generation college students at Saint Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. Beyond that, he provides, it raises critical considerations about on-line privateness:

“Emailing a sensitive document like that is about as insecure as it gets. You might as well make [the required paperwork] into a paper airplane and toss it out the window.”

The lengthy wait continues

The Education Department didn’t reply to repeated requests for touch upon the timetable for a repair, or in regards to the stories of households being advised to ship pictures of their passports by means of electronic mail.

In previous years, the final steerage with FAFSA has been for college students to finish it as quickly as doable. Amid the present delays, some universities have pushed again enrollment deadlines from the same old May 1 to June 1, whereas others have made their deposits refundable.

Meanwhile, the frustrations are mounting for college students and their households as they watch “everybody else get a head start on you,” says Short.

“You’re still standing in the starting line waiting for someone to say, ‘OK, now you can go,’ ” he provides. “Your perception is: ‘By the time I finally get there, they’re going to cross the finish line, and the money’s going to be gone.’ “

Cordova Ramirez feels that frustration deeply.

“I have done everything,” she says. “I’ve taken the extracurriculars. I’ve tried to make a good application for myself for colleges to be like, ‘Yes, that’s someone we want.’ ”

Every day, she asks herself the identical questions, time and again: “Am I going now? Am I going to pursue the career that I want? Am I going to be something in life?”