Doug French: Did you get your four?
Magda Pecsenye: No.
Doug: You weren't even looking.
Magda: I wasn't looking.
Doug: Yeah, see, you were like, you were just picking a fight. You're creating problems when you don't even know there was one.
Magda: Right. It's true.
Doug: Oh, man, why did I wait until I've been divorced from you for 15 years before I can read you like a book?
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Doug: So how are you feeling? This is a new strategy for us. We don't normally record this late at night. What's your energy level?
Magda: Energy level is fine. I think, you know, I'm like fueled with rage. You know, about the topic we're talking about. I don't know, we just had dinner.
Doug: I'm sorry, I will need more specifics on that.
Magda: Well, you know, okay, we're talking about the FAFSA, right? And it's just been a source of rage for like, I don't even know how long now.
Doug: It's amazing that neither of those F's stands for “fucking.”
Magda: I think they both do. No, I just had a very lovely dinner with my husband and my stepdaughter. We had turkey chili.
Doug: See, that's the thing, too. You're full of dinner, right?
Magda: I am full of dinner.
Doug: You could be just, like, have the post-Thanksgiving couch slouch. I'm hoping the rage you're feeling will sustain you during this conversation.
Magda: I'm drinking a mug of calming tea.
Doug: Oh, that's not good for content.
Magda: It's got Rooibos, a Rooibos base, and it's got chamomile and lavender and all kinds of stuff to try to calm me down. But yeah.
Doug: All right, well, I will have you know, my strategy is to be full of piccalilli.
Magda: I don't even know what piccalilli is.
Doug: It's delicious. I found it when I first got to London in 1989. I discovered piccalilli, which is kind of like this mustard pickle chutney-type thing.
Magda: Okay, so the British took it from India.
Doug: Yeah, absolutely. So it's definitely a holdover from colonialist time. I fell in love with that and with Branston pickle, which is a much...
Magda: Oh, I've had Branston pickle.
Doug: All right, same idea. But it's mustard based.
Magda: Oh, okay. All right.
Doug: And I found some here in town. And it's delicious. I'm not surprised that Heinz makes it. They don't make it here. It's one of those things where it sits on the, in the ethnic aisle somewhere, but it's really good. But man, how well it goes with sausage.
Magda: The British really are into their whole sausage lifestyle.
Doug: So what better way to start off a rant about FAFSA than a meal of bangers and piccalilli?
Magda: Okay. So do you want to start talking about the FAFSA?
Doug: Well, this is going to be an interesting experiment because we are here to ignite a conversation. We're here to encourage others to contribute their shared experience of what it's like to deal with this website. You've dealt with it before because you navigated it well with our older son.
Magda: Well, OK, I'm going to tell what the FAFSA is. And if we have any listeners who are not in the United States, they don't have to deal with it.
Doug: Yes. Go get some Piccalilly and call it a night.
Magda: Exactly.
Doug: Or some whatever tea she's drinking.
Magda: So I am looking at the FAFSA website–and it's F-A-F-S-A is what we're talking about. Nowhere on the front page of this website does it tell you what FAFSA actually stands for.
Doug: Well that's not a high priority for them.
Magda: Oh, it's not, but I just think it's so, so silly. The FAFSA is, I don't know what it's for. It's Free Form for Student Aid?
Doug: How much research did you do for this?
Magda: I thought I knew what the FAFSA was for.
Doug: Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
Magda: Okay, there you go. Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
Doug: With three F's.
Magda: Right, so basically the FAFSA is the form that you have to fill out to be eligible to get need-based scholarships from colleges and universities, grants from the government for higher ed, or to be able to take out student loans in the United States. Which means that everybody under a certain income basically has to fill it out, because there's no way most people can afford to write a check for, you know, 40 or 70 or $80,000 a year for their kid to go to college.
Doug: Yeah, this is the dance, right? It's like this inflated tuition that schools self-report to make themselves feel important.
Magda: Right.
Doug: And then they come at you and say, well, we'll actually give you this bit of money that
Magda: The other thing is sometimes people who make a lot of money have to fill out the FAFSA because students cannot be eligible to get a work study job on campus unless they have filled out a FAFSA. So I have a friend who makes just buckets of money, she and her husband make buckets of money, who still had to fill out the FAFSA form knowing that it wasn't going to get them any financial aid. Their daughter wanted to work while she was at college, and she wasn't going to be able to get a job on campus if they hadn't filled out the FAFSA. So it's basically like it's just a gatekeeping form.
Well, that's a good example of the shared experience that we're hoping to build. We'd like to engender a conversation about what your experience with FAFSA has been so that we can build a de facto manual of how to deal with it, how to react when the website is not responsive, etc.
Magda: The underlying concept of the FAFSA is that it's the parents of the person going to college that are filling it out with their tax information, because it's looking for information about how much money you make every year. And if you own a lot of property, like it doesn't care if you own a house that you live in. But like, you know, if you own investment properties, if you have a whole lot of money in the bank, that's not saved for retirement, that kind of stuff, right? Because they're just trying to figure out how much realistically this family can contribute. And so if there are two parents and the parents are married or living in the same household, they both fill it out together. If the parents are separated, you used to be able to choose which parent you wanted to fill it out. So it was to the benefit of the student and everyone else to have the parent who made the least amount of money fill it out. They just changed the rules this year, so now it has to be the parent who supports the child financially more, even if it's just one more penny they put into the kid every year that has to fill it out. So when you and I, Doug, were applying to college, it was this paper form that our parents had to fill out. And they had to get their tax returns from the previous year and fill out this whole thing. And it was a whole big megillah, right? And then you had to wait and they would process your form and then they would send the information to your college and to your house weeks later of what you were eligible for, and all this kind of stuff.
Now, It's been a form online for, I don't know, 25 years maybe, and it has the ability to suck your tax information out of the IRS website. So now, it used to take about 10 or 15 minutes to do it, and you have to do it every year for every kid who's in college. The parent has an account, each kid has an account. You connect those accounts. And so it's just like this rite of passage. It opens up for the new year on October 1st, until they announced over the summer that they were making big changes both in how they calculated everything and also in the website. And it wasn't going to open up until December. And then it didn't open up until the beginning of January. And now it's
Doug: And then came the revelation that there's a catastrophic calculation problem with how they do it because they did not adjust the financial information for inflation. And so the money out of context makes it look like you have more than you actually do because it doesn't reflect how much more expensive life has been over the past several years. And so the discrepancy between the awards they should be giving out and the awards the trajectory is looking to hand out, the disparity is around 1.8 billion dollars. There was a piece on NPR, which we'll link to, dated last week, the 23rd, I think, that said the Education Department says it will fix its 1.8 billion FAFSA mistakes. So the first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging you have one. So let's be thankful for small favors.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: The form had a shaky first week soft launch.
Magda: But I mean, 1.8 billion dollars. So okay, to be clear here, the Education Department is not the one that is giving grants or loans to the students. But the education department is the one that crunches the numbers that people put into the FAFSA and sends their crunched numbers to the colleges that you have applied to. And then those colleges have their own formulas about how much they offer to you in need-based financial aid. There are some schools that do what they call “meeting need.” So they basically get a number from the education department of what they think your family can pay, and then they'll tell you how much you're supposed to take out in loans, and then they'll finance the difference between what you can pay and what you can take out in loans. There are some schools that don't meet need, so they just decide how much they're going to give you and how much they want you to take out in loans, that kind of stuff. So if they’ve calculated the wrong amount that the family can pay…
Doug: Our younger child was very riled about this afternoon when the website, for whatever reason, didn't acknowledge his SSN or something.
Magda: Let's back up a little here and say that I've been saying for weeks, “oh, we should do an episode about the FAFSA,” but I thought I was going to find some expert to talk to us about the FAFSA. The problem is I couldn't find anybody–who would have been thrilled to talk about the FAFSA last year–to be recorded and have their name put out there. Because everybody is getting fucked over by this new FAFSA. The colleges are, right? Like usually what happens is everybody rushes to do the FAFSA at the beginning of October. It opens up on October 1st. And so the kids who are applying Early Decision or Early Action who want to know right away, they have to get their FAFSAs done because the colleges decide on them and give them their financial offers right away. So this year, the fact that the FAFSA didn't even open up, it was supposed to open in December, didn't even open until the very beginning of January. The colleges had no way of making any financial offers to those kids. So they are now betting on the fact that all the Early Action offers they made, those kids are going to yield and come to their schools, not knowing what their financial offers are going to be. So everybody's flying blind. And I know a whole bunch of people who are college advisors who either work in high schools or work in other organizations or work for themselves and just take private clients advising people. And everybody was like, “FAFSA this year, right?” Like, nobody wanted to come and say anything definite because they didn't have anything definite to say because the FAFSA is turning out to be just a big shitshow!
Doug: All they could do is basically corroborate all the problems based upon their extensive experience with it, but not offer up much in terms of solutions apart from just perseverance.
Magda: Right. And I don't think that I have spent as much time talking about anything as I have about the FAFSA this year.
Doug: Really? With whom?
Magda: In a concentrated period of time.
Doug: Okay.
Magda: I spent this much time talking about my own wedding with my now-husband in the six weeks leading up to the wedding. Like it's just everywhere I go, it's some conversation about the FAFSA. And part of that is because our child is applying to college. And so I'm in two pretty serious getting-into-college groups. And then people who aren't even in those groups are talking about it a lot. I mean, I went out to a thing with a friend of mine yesterday, and she picked me up and drove me and then drove me home. And then she stayed for dinner. And on the way to the event, we were talking about it, because she has a kid who's applying to college also right now and a kid who's also in college. Bear in mind, she and her husband had to fill out the FAFSA and attach it to her existing college student's record and also fill it out on behalf of the student, her kid that's applying to college. They had all kinds of roadblocks, and then we ended up talking about the FAFSA at the event we were at with the other people at the event! We talked about the FAFSA on the way back to my house and then she was there for dinner and we talked about the FAFSA with Mike.
Doug: See, isn't that a great thing about outer Boston traffic? You have so much more time in the car to rant about FAFSA.
Magda: Yeah, I don't know. It's just so weird. One of the schools did a webinar last week on filling out the FAFSA and the whole financial aid process at this school.
Doug: Did they though?
Magda: The FAFSA organization had told this college that it was going to send everybody's calculated information that had put in the code for this college, it was going to send all of their crunched numbers to this college at the beginning of February. Not a specific date, “at the beginning of February.” Bear in mind that the way it used to work, and when I did this for our older child, I went in and did my part. It sucked out my tax returns from the IRS, blah, blah, blah. I clicked off on it. Our son made an account that was connected and he went in and he put in the numerical codes for the schools he was applying to, and then he signed off on it. And then I went in again and I hit Submit. And then it popped out that number in a report to all the schools that we had put the codes in for, right? And then if you decided later that you were applying to other schools, you could go back into your FAFSA, put those new codes in and put submit in. It would instantly send that number to the other schools. So it did have a little bit of lag of calculation time, but that lag was like, you know, part of a day or a couple days, depending on what the traffic was.
Doug: It was responsive, right, yeah.
Magda: But now it's like, you know, my friend and her husband filled out the FAFSA, I don't know, two weeks ago, and the schools that their kid has applied to, none of those schools have received the numbers, nor has the school that their current college junior, who needs to give him his offer for next year of financial aid, they haven't received it either. If the colleges are being told by the education department, we're going to give you all the numbers for the kids who applied to your school at the beginning of February, some mysterious time. In the meantime,
parents and students who have applied to college are getting emails, sort of badgering, frantic sounding emails from a lot of the colleges saying, hey, hey, send us your FAFSA, fill out the FAFSA or else we can't calculate your aid. But what if we've already filled out the FAFSA and the education department isn't even going to send it for another week or two?
Doug: Well, that's what I was thinking about in terms of what need were they addressing with this update? What was wrong? What was broken? Or did they just want to move slow and break things?
Magda: Well, so I don't know what the actual need was. Two of the changes that I know that they made in this were, number one, there used to be a big, I don't know what they called it. It was like a sibling credit. If you had more than one child or dependent in an institution of higher ed. So like you have to fill out the FAFSA if you're going to technical school or like getting an associate's degree or whatever, right? Or even getting a master's degree or a PhD, if it's not funded, or whatever, right? So if you had two dependents or more, you got credit for that. And so what they calculated you could pay for each one was smaller. The education department wanted to shrink that credit. So parents were now going to be asked to pay more, even if they had multiple kids in institutes of higher education.
And then the other one was kind of filling that gap in the two parent, the separated parent thing, because it used to be that if two parents had 50-50 custody of kids, which a lot of parents do, either one could fill out the FAFSA, but both did not have to fill out the FAFSA. So, it behooved everyone, you know, if the parents could communicate with each other and were not, like, at each other's throats all the time, and both were going to contribute to college.
And that's a big if, by the way, yeah.
Magda: Right. When you're talking about thousands of dollars, I think people can cooperate a little bit better. And maybe they can about other things. But basically what would happen is...
Doug: It feels weird calling you naive, but go on.
Magda: Well, basically what would happen was they would pick which parent had the smaller income and also the least assets and have that parent fill out the FAFSA. And you and I, when our older child was going through this, were at a parent college night thing in which they mentioned this and there was a financial aid person from a major university who was there who said directly to us and to everyone in the room, “If you are divorced, if the parents live separately, if you have 50-50 custody, pick the parent that makes the least amount of money and has the least number of assets because then you would have the lower financial contribution expected for college and colleges knew you did that.” Like the whole thing about the colleges is they want kids to be able to come there. So they're not trying to just price it out of everybody's reach. They're trying to walk this razor's edge between making kids able to come there, but still getting the most money from each kid that they can.
Doug: And this was the long term plan. We got divorced when our kids were six and three, and we knew that when it came time for college, we were going to game the system like pros. See, I get that. I think that's an important change. It's an annoying change, but that shouldn't change the way you fill out the FAFSA. I mean, it shouldn't matter. There are deeper reforms than this, right, in terms of how the nuts and bolts work.
Magda: Right, so what, like, what you're saying is, it changes the way the user fills out the FAFSA. Because now the changes, you can't just pick the parent that makes the least, you have to pick the parent who's giving the kid more financial support, right? And they look at things like who pays a kid's telephone bill and, you know, stuff like that, right? So you could-
Doug: Do they though? I didn't see any of that when I filled it out.
Magda: Well, no, they didn't, but it's the honor system, right? And I guess like the fear is you're at the end, you sign off under like penalty of perjury. It's an official governmental form, right?
Doug: That you can change at any time though.
Magda: Well, except while it's in review.
Doug: But there is a whoops option.
Magda: Yeah, there is. Well, I mean the thing is like people end up having differences in property that they own or maybe they didn't have some form for their taxes when they filled them out and then the form came and so they had to revise their taxes and so they're revising the FAFSA, right? So it's possible to revise it. But what you're saying is, it changes the way the user approaches filling it out, but it should not change the back end of the form. It shouldn't change the technology or the programming of the form at all. All it really is doing is changing the formula. Like if this was an Excel file, it would just be changing the formula in one or two different cells to figure this out. But now the big problem with the form is for people who have not had FAFSA accounts before. So if your kid is already in college and you've done this before, people are still able to get into their accounts. But people who are starting accounts, there's apparently a Social Security Number error in which the site is not holding on to the number that you enter correctly and is only storing some of the digits and then can't match you to a living person. So you can't actually fill out the form. And what our son discovered when he was wrestling with it today was it would allow him to type in the first, well, all of his Social Security Number and hit Save. And then when it was supposed to save again, it said “changes cannot be saved.” And it kept defaulting to, it was like zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, and then his actual four last digits. So he couldn't get to the part where he was able to sign off on the information that you had entered.
Doug: And it just keeps like people around and around and around and around. And the codes for the colleges he wants the FAFSA sent to.
Magda: Yeah. And so, you know, you've done your part. You did all of that work with all the, you know, putting in all your numbers.
Doug: Yeah. And I think what you, your advice was great because you said, even if you can't do everything right away, just make sure you get your account set up.
Magda: What I was hearing from people on, like, January 10th was, “oh, crap, I can't get an account. It won't let me set it up an account.” And then I was hearing from people, “we tried at four different times of day, every day for three days in a row. And on the fourth day, we tried again, and it finally set up an account.” So what I said to you was-
Doug: I got mine at seven o'clock in the morning on Saturday.
Magda: Yeah, exactly.
Doug: Go off peak.
Magda: Right. Why, why, why, why? It used to be that the FAFSA was a mess on like October 1st and 2nd and 3rd. But if you waited until like the 5th or 6th, you could get on and do it. The biggest problem with the FAFSA I ever had was not remembering the password to my FAFSA ID. Now it's-
Doug: Wait, so you didn't save it anywhere?
Magda: Um, no, I don't, I don't know.
Doug: Okay.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: And Chrome didn't save it?
Magda: Um, no, Chrome didn't save it. So, I mean, this is just really, really frustrating. And so our kid can't get in now. Are you getting all of the emails from all the schools that he's applied to?
Doug: No.
Magda: Okay, I think he's putting in my email address as the parent email address, because every time he applies to another school, and he's going application crazy, because it's all in the common app now, so he's like, “Oh, hey, this school looks interesting. Let me apply there.” So I keep getting emails that are like, “Hey, we've received your student’s application. Join the eagle family network,” “join the owl family network,” you know, like all these mascots, right? “Join the wolf pack family network.” Okay, why would I join your network, your family network, before my kid is actually even accepted at your school, but all right. It's just been kind of funny and then
Doug: Well, it's nice to know which schools are super thirsty.
Magda: Yeah, I've gotten a couple that said “Hey, we'd like to give you your financial aid decision at the same time. We give you your acceptance and fill out the FAFSA,” and it's like I don't know what to tell you. I would like to fill out the FAFSA but the FAFSA cannot hold my child's Social Security Number even though that's, like, its only job.
Doug: So what's going to happen now is that they're going to offer acceptances minus the financial aid offer and it's going to be a little bit the cart before the horse or the cart long after the horse and schools are going to have to understand that they can't pressure people into acceptances, or I wonder if acceptances will be rescindable. I mean, is it all going to be transfer portal stuff like the college athletes who can just decide they're leaving or can, you know, decommit from a school they just committed to because commitment means nothing?
Magda: The only time commitment means anything in the college application process is for Early Decision. And Early Decision is binding. Some schools now have Early Decision 1 and then another round of Early Decision 2. And Early Decision 2 decisions are coming out right now. And those are binding, like you sign a thing when you apply Early Decision saying, “if I get in, I'm coming, I understand that I'm going to owe this much money to go and I'm coming.” Now, what happens if you really don't do that? I don't know. But they try to put the fear of God in you, you know, the same way the administrators tell the kids like you got accepted to school in December to your dream school, like if you let your letter grade slip even down to a B minus, that school's going to rescind your acceptance. So it's so dumb.
I think that actually happened to one person, but well, okay. It was a catastrophic drop-off.
I think it's much more that you’d have to completely check out. I have heard of plenty of cases of kids doing horrible things on the internet and then having their admittances rescinded. But just grades doesn't seem to be, you know, like the colleges aren't really that concerned if you're not pouring on the steam at the end of your second semester as a senior.
Doug: Yeah, high schoolers, I'm so grateful neither of our kids ever got a Twitter account. But you do see stories of kids who are scraping their accounts or taking them off entirely.
Magda: Yeah. Well, I mean, I also am not convinced that it happens as much now because I think the kids now really grew up with social media being a thing and they understand what it's like. I think a lot of these stories happened like 10 years ago, when those kids didn't really understand that posting horrible things that other people could see them.
Doug: So, you know, lurking over TikTok.
Magda: Exactly. I mean, it's like when a cat goes behind the drapes and hides, but you can still see their tail sticking out. Like, I think that's what a lot of these kids who are now, you know, almost 30, what happened to them, right?
Doug: So that's what's going to happen though, right? We're going to have cart before the horse stuff, whereby acceptances and rejections are going to happen earlier in the cycle than the financial aid decisions.
Magda: Yes. And let's also talk about what's happened the last couple of years before, because of the pandemic. So during the pandemic, kids went to school in the fall of 2020, but like they weren't actually able to go to classes. Some of them didn't go to school. Some of them took a gap year. Some of them went to a semester and then dropped out. Some of them dropped out for two years or whatever and then wanted to come back. So for the high school classes of 2021 and 2022, things were still really messed up because the schools didn't have as many slots in their classes as they would have, because they had people who had deferred or taken time off or whatever because of the pandemic coming in and all the classes were all mixed up. Combine that with the fact that the Rise of the Common App, which it's just a form, it's a database, you open this
common app account, you load your essay into it, and you load your transcript into it, and you put all of your volunteer activities and your activities at school, and you have your recommendation letters. And then when you want to apply to a school, instead of having to fill out the form for every individual school, you just shoot your Common App over to them. Because it's so easy to apply and because of the rise of the competitiveness of schools, kids, instead of applying to, I think when you and I were applying to school, they were told to apply to like three to six colleges and two of them were supposed to be safety schools. Kids are routinely now applying to 15 to 20 schools, which means that colleges are getting two to three times as many applications as they were in the past.
Doug: And more fees.
Magda: Yeah. And more fees. But what that also means is a school that used to get, say, 10,000 applications for 2000 slots in that class is now getting 30,000 applications and they're still trying to fill that same 2000 slots. So they're still accepting whatever percentage has traditionally yielded 2,000 for them, right? Maybe they had to accept 3,000 students and 2,000 of them would come. Now they're only accepting 3,000. They're accepting the top 3,000 of those 30,000 applications they get.
But all their competitor schools got those same 30,000 applications from those same 30,000 kids. So they may not get 2,000 kids who say yes to them out of the 3,000 that they accept. So this rise in applications has made all schools more competitive and harder to get accepted at, but it's also screwed with the yield of the schools because they don't necessarily have enough information to know how many kids they have to accept out of the increased number of applications to yield the same number of students that they would have in previous years. There was already a lot of turmoil. People have been saying for five years that safety schools don't exist anymore because schools will look at your package. And if you look like you're too advanced for that school, they know you won't attend. And they don't want to make their numbers of kids that they accept who actually go there look too low. So they will preemptively turn down those kids knowing that they won't go there. So it's all just a big mess. And now this FAFSA thing is making it even worse.
Doug: We should also direct people to episode four of the podcast when we had Akil Bello on. We talked a lot about this stuff. We should probably try to have him on again to see what his experience has been. I mean, he talks a lot about how, for example, people are applying to so many more schools and it costs money to apply to a school. Then it's creating income disparities among the people who can afford to carpet bomb the application process in the first place. It's feeding into the entire narrative of how everybody is just trying to work so hard to make college that much harder to get into and to pay for. It's a surprise of being 50, which is the greater theme of our podcast is who would have thought when we were in college that at some point a majority of kids would be fundamentally distrusting the idea that college was worth it.
That's another part of this whole thing. I think that the kids who are applying to college right now, this year, most of them have Gen X parents. And for Gen Xers, college did end up making sense in the long run. A lot of us came out of college into entry-level jobs that we wouldn't have been able to get into without a college education, and have had some sort of career path that was at least aided by the fact that we went to college. The kids who are applying to college five years from now are the ones who are going to have Millennial parents. And the Millennials are the generation that got screwed because their parents and grandparents were saying to them, “You have to go to college. It's always worth it to go to college. Take out whatever loans you have to take out to go to college because you'll be able to come out and get any job you want and it'll totally be worth it.” And they're the ones who came out with whatever degree they had and instead of getting a $10 an hour job with their college education, they were able to get a $13 an hour job. They still have not earned their way out of that. And a lot of them will not trust that the same thing isn't going to happen to their kids. They're not going to be willing to let their kids take out loans like they did. And they're also not convinced that college is worth it, because for them, college absolutely wasn't worth it. So, then, I don't know what's going to happen to this whole college thing. Is it just going to be a much, much smaller group of kids that are applying to 20 or 25 colleges and then a whole bunch of other kids who are going into trades or doing some other careers that don't even exist yet that are not going to require college degrees? Like, what's going to happen? But this whole…
Doug: Well, it sounds like they're going to be just farms for rich people's kids.
Magda: This is going to be state schools, and then this very, very small group of highly rejective colleges that wealthy people are still trying to send their kids to.
Doug: This could be a whole jeremiad about the economy and life in general. So let's bring it back into our FAFSA now. Yeah, because we really want to get people talking and sharing information of what's worked and what hasn't. Because we want to build up a body of work that's not based on assurances from people who purport to know what they're doing. Because truth be told, you're not going to find many assurances right now until the ship gets righted. So the best we can do is create a community of shared experience to say, hey, I did this and it worked. I tried this and it didn't. Like, for example, I'm telling you, get your account on the FAFSA website. Do it off peak, do it at some time when there likely won't be a lot of traffic to the site. I did it on my first try.
Magda: Yeah, that kind of thing.
Doug: So we're hoping people will go to our Facebook group and kind of contribute what worked and what didn't ask questions. And it's all a big networking exercise. And I think we can build a pretty impressive body of work just based upon the experiences of our listeners.
Magda: Right. Well, and if anybody knows how to get past the Social Security Number issue, because the other thing is, you know, he tried it three times and it didn't work. And so he tried to do chat help. Well, because he doesn't have a real account because it can't confirm his Social Security Number, he wasn't able to do chat help. He could only call in. So he called in and just got some like, you know, “the volume of calls is too high. Call again later.”
Doug: Which is why, so maybe we'll have him call tonight. He's up all night anyway.
Magda: Maybe, it's open 24-7 isn't it?
Doug: I can check that, but I think now the reaction to the problem as it exists now is it needs to be accessible 24-7 because of the log jams we've talked about. So I bet if he tried somebody at 2 in the morning he might get somebody.
Magda: He might get somebody and who knows they might be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to talk to him.
Doug: Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Is anyone bright-eyed or bushy-tailed in the 21st century?
Magda: I don't really think so. Not anymore. I mean, we've all been beaten down too much.
Doug: I think we're all pretty dull-eyed and rat-tailed at this point.
Magda: Yeah, I think so. I think so, too.
Doug: You know what I'm thinking, too? I'm thinking, like, when I see FAFSA, all I think of is Gregor Samsa.
Magda: Like, you woke up one morning and you had turned into a governmental form that was morally suspect?
Doug: Well, it's just yeah, the whole plan to get financial aid has turned into a cockroach.
Magda: So, Thomas and I were visiting schools a couple months ago and we went to one school and you know, we were on campus and we didn't really like the way the campus looked anyway. And so we went into the presentation, and one of their directors of admissions came in and did this whole presentation and she called it “the FASFA” the whole time. And I was like okay I understand that F-A-F-S-A could be difficult to say. It could be a little bit of a tongue twister. But this is her entire job. You would think–
Doug: And if she got the name of the school wrong, that would be bad, too.
Magda: Well, yeah, that would have been bad, too. But I don't know. I mean, I kind of checked out when she said it wrong the first two times. And then at the end, I said to Thomas, well, what do you think? And he was like, “she didn't know the name of the FAFSA.” So OK, it would be as if a baker didn't know the difference between all purpose and bread flour.
Doug: So anyway, it seems like an alarmingly specific defect.
Magda: Right. I mean, like, I consistently cannot spell Connecticut, but I also have no even tangential relationship to the state.
Doug: How is that possible? It's three words. Connect. I cut.
Magda: I just somehow can't get it through my head that there's not two T's at the end.
Doug: Two T's at the end? Okay, that's...
Magda: I just think it should be ConnectiCUTT.
Doug: Well, my mother cannot spell furniture without an extra I. She always writes down fur-i-ni-ture.
Magda: Oh, okay. I get it.
Doug: And I guess she's thinking of aluminium furiniture in Great Britain.
Magda: Well, I mean, it's kind of like the way vinaigrette is spelled, more like vin-eye-ah-grette. Some of these words come from French, but I don't know, like, I think five letters, you could, you can get to it.
Doug: Well, we've veered off into a Jeremiad against bad spelling. So that's par for the course here at When the Flames Go Up. I guess we can reiterate the goal, right? Just meet us on Facebook, tell us about what your story is. We'll keep you posted about ours. I gotta say, I think, I mean, I'm enjoying this. I don't know why I am, but the bottom line is, now that I am involved in this, because I am the head of household and the primary caregiver involved in this particular application, I feel weirdly exhilarated by the prospect of figuring this out. This is a Saturday crossword puzzle for me. It's the thrill of the chase. It's climbing the mountain because it's there.
Magda: It's as if you were doing the Saturday crossword on the website and it wouldn't hold on to any vowels when you entered them in.
Doug: And you were underwater. Right. What do you think? Do we have it all?
Magda: Yeah, I think this is it. I mean, I think we just spent an hour saying, “This thing's fucking us over and we don't know what to do about it.” But yeah, I mean, I don't think that's the worst thing to say, because I think, you know, in past years, there's been a whole lot of, you know, like the fall is the time of experts writing tips about the FAFSA. And this fall, it was like the experts saying, “I don't know, we don't know when it's even going to come out.” And now it's just crickets. It's absolutely crickets. Because no, even the people who used to know everything about the FAFSA, are completely at the mercy of the Department of Education. They're like, we do not know. They had told us this. We don't have any idea.
Doug: Well, I guess look at the bright side. We could be doing all this with Betsy DeVos at the helm still.
Magda: That is absolutely true. And that would be horrible.
Doug: So yes, we'll end this with a nice little political dig against a woman who has way too much influence in this state still.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: And thank you for listening to Episode 32 of the When the Flames Go Up podcast with Magda Pecsenye Zarin and me, Doug French. Our guest has been Anton Chekhov. No! Our guest has been Franz Kafka.
Magda: “Our guest has been Anton Chekhov.” I'm like, what?
Doug: You know, Eastern European writers, I confuse them all the time. “Our guest has been Vladimir Nabokov.” “Our guest has been Humbert Humbert, who's trying to get his girlfriend into college.”
Magda: That’s horrible!
Doug: When the Flames Go Up is a production of Halfway Noodles LLC and is available on all the usual platforms where you can find a quality podcast as well as whentheflamesgoup.substack.com. Please subscribe there if you don't already for our weekly episode which drops every Wednesday and our Friday Flames newsletter every Friday. If you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, please leave us a review. That concludes this week's rant. We'll be back next week with another guest. And until then, thanks for listening. Best of luck with FAFSA–or “FASFA,” if you have a particular block on that sort of thing–and we'll see you on Facebook so we can all solve this together. Bye bye.
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Magda: All right, I'm going downstairs. The fourth season of Project Runway isn't going to watch itself.
Doug: Okay. Yeah, that's what I'm seeing now. “What We're Watching,” you can just tune in every Friday on Friday Flames to figure out that she's still watching Project Runway and I'm still watching Northern Exposure.