<p>My D received her admissions decision for one of her schools over the phone yesterday. When she asked about Financial Aid, the person said they were missing her FAFSA. We completed the FAFSA on January 23rd, and I re-visited the FAFSA website yesterday to confirm that all of her schools are listed.</p>
<p>Any idea what "missing" means? That they haven't processed her financial aid yet, or that the FAFSA never showed up at the school? If it never showed up, how does one go about getting it there?</p>
<p>Since the school is plainly on the list of those we submitted FAFSA to, I'm not sure what we should do other than call back today and ask someone different for clarification.</p>
<p>Did she check off the box for financial aid? I had to ask my D’s college to pull up her FAFSA for her to get a Stafford Loan. They weren’t looking for it since we didn’t ask for institutional aid.</p>
<p>Yes, she did indicate she would apply for financial aid.</p>
<p>Have you done the data retrieval with IRS? It may be that the school is waiting for that.</p>
<p>No, we filled in the FAFSA online from completed tax returns.</p>
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<p>That sounds like exactly the right thing to do! And if they still can’t find it, ask to speak with someone higher up . . . and tell them just what you said here.</p>
<p>Well, now I’m really concerned. I managed to navigate to the part of her account where financial aid status should be shown, and it has 2011-12 “none on file” and 2012-13 “none on file”, which is fine because she just applied for 2013-14 as a freshman. But 2013-14 does not appear on the status list at all. I don’t know why the two previous years would appear at all.</p>
<p>I doubt they will talk to me without her on the phone, correct?</p>
<p>Out of an abundance of paranoia, I tried calling without D as she will be home late tonight and today is the deadline for this school. A very nice lady checked into it. She could see that we filed a FAFSA but that for some reason their system was not importing it. She was making a note to have it manually imported.</p>
<p>Better start checking a couple of her other schools to make sure this was an isolated incident…</p>
<p>It is possible that something is incorrect in the school’s database for your D. You might want to see if they have the correct SSN … if their SSN is incorrect for her, the FAFSA might not match up. Also, sometimes a batch of FAFSA’s will get “stuck” or missed. If you are sure that all her info is correct at the school, and if you are certain that she put the correct school code for that particular campus of the school (not a branch campus, med school, or law school), then ask them to check to see if they can access her FAFSA at CPS Online. If they can, it means that a computer glitch kept them from receiving her FAFSA. They will need to work that out on their end. You might have to go up the chain of command to find someone who knows what you are talking about … or you might get someone who knows the back-end process the first time around.</p>
<p>I had to help more than one student who put the med school code instead of the main school code. We could see that the FAFSA was filed, but none of the info had imported into our system. The student had to fix the school code.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I have had students whose FAFSA’s got stuck somewhere in computer-land & we had to do a manual import. No idea what happened to keep it from coming in correctly!</p>
<p>Thanks, kelsmom. We did in fact confirm a few critical identifiers such as her social, DOB, exact name, etc. while I had the Financial Aid person on the phone. We confirmed the school code on the FAFSA SAR last night, and all of her schools appear correct. And yes, the FA person was in fact able to see that the FAFSA had been filed and for whatever reason needed to be uploaded manually. Thank you for responding as you did though, as it gives me a little more confidence that this may have been an isolated glitch on the school’s end.</p>