‘The Last Straw’ for Weary Financial Aid Officers

Christine Taylor is too busy to talk on the phone. 

The director of financial aid at Bellevue College would love to vent about how difficult the past year has been. But it’s busy season at the largest community and technical college in Washington State, and she has student aid disbursements to oversee, following a trying year of navigating the delayed, error-riddled rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FASFA). She also has two new temporary staff members to train—essential help as she prepares to deal with student questions about the new federal aid formula.

She’s doing it all with a staff of nine, including the two new employees. And Bellevue enrolls nearly 20,000 students.

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Taylor used to have more help. She said she has lost two staffers since 2022, and has four job openings posted that have stayed unfilled since the COVID-19 pandemic.

After a disappointing national ad campaign for the jobs failed to attract a single applicant, Taylor had to look beyond traditional avenues to fill those openings. She brought her two new “hires” in from Bellevue’s customer service office, and hired a retail worker from Best Buy to fill one position after lowering qualifications on the job posting. One of her best employees is a work-study student who is graduating this term. 

“There is a major burnout problem,” she wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “The struggle to hire is so intense.”

A recent survey from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources found that over half of financial aid professionals are likely to switch jobs in the next year. Many colleges have a staff of fewer than five financial aid officers; a handful lost all their staff and had to outsource the office’s work to a third party.

It’s a bad time to be understaffed, as the botched FAFSA rollout has flooded financial aid offices with extra work and a deluge of complaints and questions from frustrated parents and students. Staffing issues were a driving force behind the Education Department’s $50 million assistance plan to help under-resourced institutions handle the inflated workload.

“I barely know any colleagues whose offices are fully staffed today,” said David Sheridan, director of financial aid at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “For that to be the case at a time when there’s this unprecedented mess, how could you not burn out?”

When Taylor finally got a break in her day on Thursday, she called Inside Higher Ed while waiting in line to pick up her lunch between training sessions. She said she’d been working late nights preparing to send out student aid packages—which, because of software issues resulting from the FAFSA changes, Bellevue won’t be able to start doing until June 10. She said her office plans to shut down for two weeks to focus only on processing forms so students get their offers before July.

The stress of it all has taken a definite toll on her mental health.

“I have had to get on medication just to stop myself from crying all the time,” she said. “It’s hard not to internalize all the stress and what students are going through. It’s just so much.”

‘A Slow Rolling Tide’

The crisis has been building since long before this spring’s bungled FAFSA launch. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a mass exodus of financial aid professionals left colleges facing unprecedented staff shortages. A 2022 NASFAA survey found that 80 percent of institutions’ financial aid offices were concerned about their ability to remain “administratively capable” due to staffing issues.

Sheridan, 65, retired from Columbia yesterday after 40 years in the field. He said he’d been planning to stop working for a few years and the FAFSA crisis validated his decision.

Over the course of his career, he’s seen talented colleagues move from college to college, seeking reprieve from the heavy workloads and low pay they optimistically thought might just be an institutional problem, only to reach a fever pitch of frustration. Eventually, he said, many left for less demanding jobs at advocacy organizations and consulting firms.

“The job keeps getting more and more challenging. We have a far bigger role in the enrollment management picture than ever before, especially at struggling colleges,” Sheridan said. “This FAFSA mess-up is kind of the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”

Draeger said another source of pressure for financial aid offices is the ever-growing regulatory environment of Title IV funding.

“Title IV and financial aid is one of the bigger entry points for a lot of compliance and regulations, and because of that, the financial aid office has become a big nexus of federal rules and regulations,” he said. “That has worked against a lot of people getting into financial aid, and maybe even more so, staying in financial aid.”

Taylor said the constant churn of new responsibilities and regulations adds even more work to the office, because staff need to re-train every year. This year, the new gainful employment rule is causing headaches, even though the Education Department pushed its implementation deadline from July 31 to October 1.

“The government just keeps putting more and more on us … everything you think you know is always changing, so I spend so much time training people and training myself, and it just goes round and round,” she said. “Just when you think you see a light at the end of the tunnel, there’s something else.”

From Anger to Despair

Draeger said many of the frustrated financial aid officers he speaks with still love their work, but are trying to leave their current jobs for financial aid employment at other colleges. That gives him hope for some solutions to the turnover crisis, like higher wages and more flexible work schedules. 

But most of those solutions are entrenched in broader issues concerning higher ed finances, especially at under-resourced institutions.

“It’s not too late to stem the tide, but these aren’t easy problems to solve,” Draeger said.

One of the biggest issues plaguing morale in financial aid is a crisis of confidence in what once felt like a mission of public good, Sheridan said. As college has gotten more expensive and financial aid becomes as much a recruiting tool as a socioeconomic mobility engine, some financial aid professionals are also becoming disillusioned with their work.

“I’ve had students break down in tears in my office more times than I can count,” he said. “The social uplifting mission that drew many of us to the profession in the first place is harder and harder to reconcile with the realities of the job.”

Taylor said that tension has become more pronounced because of the FAFSA fiasco, as her email inbox and phone lines are flooded with parents and students who have nowhere else to turn to vent their frustrations. The worst part, she said, is that she’s powerless to help them.

“You really want to help students; that’s why you get into this work. It’s certainly not the pay,” she said. “When you don’t feel like you’re doing that anymore, it becomes demoralizing. It makes you wonder what you’re working so hard for.” 

Taylor said she tries to keep staff around by shouldering more of the burdens herself, letting staff take time off even when she desperately needs every available worker. 

“I have to protect a staff that’s crumbling to pieces because all the blame from the students is on them, and all the pressure from the college,” she said. Of course, that only makes more work for her and her associate director. But Bellevue can’t afford to lose any more financial aid staff. 

“Believe me,” she said, “if I could retire, I would.”