"Student Financial Aid Packages Don’t Account for Pandemic's Economic Blow."
Abigail Seldin has spent years working to help college students navigate the cumbersome financial aid appeals process. As the founder and CEO of the Seldin/Haring-Smith Foundation (SHSF), she has partnered with FormSwift, college counselors, financial aid officers, other higher education professionals, and students to develop SwiftStudent. Launched in 2020, SwiftStudent is a free, online tool that provides students with appeal letter templates and a framework to move through the appeals process.
“We really thought of SwiftStudent as being a translation tool, if that makes sense,” Seldin explains. “Financial aid in the United States is its own language, and institutions and the federal government have more work to do to make that language more easily understood by students and their family.”
Seldin began developing the SwiftStudent tool in December 2019, so pandemic-specific considerations weren’t yet in mind. But once SHSF launched SwiftStudent in April 2020, the need was immediately clear. “We had traffic [to the website] in all 50 states within three days of launch, and that’s been consistent over the last year,” Seldin says. “I think that really speaks to the national need. This pain of COVID-19 is being felt everywhere. Students were struggling before the pandemic, but those needs have become more acute during the pandemic. Housing and food insecurity were high before and are higher now.”
The tool’s templates provide letter guidelines that cover a number of different circumstances. For example, the Parental Income Exclusion Request lettercan be used for students experiencing homelessness or those moving through the foster care system. It also applies to students whose parents are incarcerated and LGBTQ students (or others) who might be estranged from their families and are unable to get financial support. The Dependent Care Allowance Request letter can be used for students who provide at least 50% financial support for another person. Young people who picked up part-time work during the pandemic to help take care of their family after a parent was laid off may fall under this category.
“Students have lost jobs, their parents have lost jobs, they've had hours reduced,” Seldin explains, reflecting on the past year. “People have been evicted from their homes or had their homes foreclosed on. People have had health disasters. It's a wide spectrum of extraordinarily tough circumstances that students today are contending with, and many of those tough circumstances are expensive — and college is expensive. When we see increased traffic to our tool, we are not surprised.”
View the full article in Teen Vogue.
