Troubled FAFSA rollout complicates college acceptance for some seniors
Garcia said attending college "means having an opportunity to get out of here."
It's an opportunity made possible through the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.
"FAFSA, man, they have a lot of issues," Garcia told CBS News. "It always gave me, like, some errors, or something. Yes, it was just pretty tedious."
After a botched rollout of last year's FAFSA application under the Biden administration, it was delayed again this year, with students encountering error messages and glitches on the site. Making things more challenging were the unprecedented cuts to the Department of Education last month, impacting nearly half of the office of Federal Student Aid, which is responsible for managing FAFSA.
Garcia, who will be attending Los Angeles Trade Tech Community College in the fall, said he tried to call the Federal Student Aid Information Center for help "more times than what I can count. At some point I just wanted to stop."
Lina McCormick-Morin, deputy director of the Southern California College Attainment Network — an education equity group that seeks to help underrepresented students achieve a college education, helps low-income students navigate the FAFSA system.
"The process is really grueling," McCormick-Morin said. "It is genuinely like filing taxes and being audited at the same time."
Thursday is National College Decision Day, which is the deadline for when most college-bound students have to declare which school they will attend in the fall.
McCormick-Morin has seen college dreams put on hold, as only 58% of eligible California high school seniors successfully submitted FAFSA applications for the upcoming school year, according to the California Student Aid Commission.
"It is difficult to see what is efficient about cutting the working capacity of any department that was already understaffed," McCormick-Morin said.
University of Southern California junior Stephani Jaramillo and California State University, Northridge junior Jose Pablo-Corona told CBS News they don't have safety nets — they only have FAFSA.
"I worry that without that help, I won't be able to continue my education," Pablo-Corona said. "So I'm pretty worried."
Jaramillo said that "for me, financial aid is hope, it's a stepping stone to reaching a potential future that I've been looking forward to my whole life."
Now, both are concerned whether they will see their financial aid in time to complete college.
"Everyone chases some sort of American dream," Jaramillo said. "No matter what it looks like, some sort of, like, happiness and stability. For me, that's my education."
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USA Today
a few seconds ago
- USA Today
Trump brings back dreaded Presidential Fitness Test. Let's see him run a mile.
Many of us look back on this once-mandatory fitness test with fond memories of the fear and anxiety it provoked and the feelings of inadequacy we healthily buried in the deepest recesses of our minds. President Donald Trump is following through on his bold commitment to traumatize all Americans, regardless of age, by reinstating the Presidential Fitness Test for school children. Many of us look back on this once-mandatory fitness test with fond memories of the fear and anxiety it provoked and the feelings of inadequacy we healthily buried in the deepest recesses of our minds. For me, a middle schooler who wore jeans cruelly labeled 'Husky,' running one mile in the Florida heat and finishing close to last while crying undoubtedly forged me into the man I am today: a chiseled physical specimen with fabulously low self-esteem and an abundance of insecurity. The fitness test – which included everything from push-ups to sit-ups to the aforementioned run – started in the 1960s, back when emotionally torturing children was legal. It invariably pitted the jocks against the non-jocks and made those who couldn't excel at the various exercises feel like week-old meatloaf. Obama rightly did away with the dreaded Presidential Fitness Test... President Barack Obama ended the program in 2012, replacing it with an approach to fitness that focused on the abilities of individual students and encouraged healthier lifelong behavior. Opinion: Insecure Trump knows he'll never measure up to Obama. And it kills him. Trump, naturally, wants to return America to its imagined glory days, back when bullying was encouraged and physical fitness centered around exercises we now know can lead to gym-aversion and a lifetime of lower back pain. ...so of course, Trump is bringing the traumatic test back On July 31, the president famous for his love of fast food and riding around a golf course slumped-over the steering wheel of a motorized cart proudly signed an executive order telling American schoolchildren to stop being such puny weaklings. 'This was a wonderful tradition," Trump said incorrectly, "and we're bringing it back." Opinion: Trump's mental decline is on vivid display as he rages about Epstein, windmills Because sanity died earlier this year, Trump is putting Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a sentient slab of beef jerky who eats road kill, in charge of the new test, which one can assume will involve challenges like: drinking a gallon of raw milk then waiting to see if you die from a listeria infection, running away from scientific evidence, and swimming a half-mile in a sewage pond. Trump and 'fitness' don't exactly seem to go together As a Presidential Fitness Test victim and survivor, I wholeheartedly endorse Trump's decision to bring back this dreadful idea, under one condition: Donald Trump must run one mile on live television. That's it. That's the deal. People around Trump are constantly bragging about how healthy and robust and amazing he is, even though he looks like he'd get winded walking to the chicken nuggets chafing dish at the Mar-a-Lago buffet. Fox News host Jesse Watters recently said: "Trump golfs. He has dad strength. You know dad strength? He doesn't look like he's in shape, but then he grabs you – one time my father grabbed me, and I was like, 'Oh, my God this guy is stronger than I am!'" We can delve more into the daddy issues behind that weird comment another time, but for now I say this: Let's see Trump crush a one-mile run. We can make it a global pay-per-view event and likely make enough to pay down the national debt Trump has swollen with his big, beautiful tax bill. If our "strong" president wants to bring back a dreaded and pointless fitness test, he needs to put his jogging loafers where his mouth is. On your mark, get set ... everybody laugh. Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on Bluesky at @ and on Facebook at
Atlantic
2 minutes ago
- Atlantic
The Warped Idealism of Trump's Trade Policy
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Tomorrow is Donald Trump's deadline to agree to trade deals before he imposes tariffs, and he means it this time. Why are you laughing? (In fact, since saying that yesterday, he's already chickened out with Mexico, putting the 'taco' in, well, TACO.) But the president has already written off hopes of reaching agreements with some allies. Yesterday, Trump announced that he was raising tariffs on many Brazilian goods to 50 percent across the board, as retribution for Brazil's prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally. This morning, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Prime Minister Mark Carney's decision to recognize a Palestinian state 'will make it very hard' to strike a deal with Canada. The president's perpetual caving can make him seem craven and opportunistic, but you can detect a different impulse in his handling of trade policy too: a warped kind of idealism. When Trump began his political career, he said he would put ' America First,' rather than using American power to enforce values overseas. Wars to fight repressive autocrats were foolish ways to burn cash and squander American lives. The promotion of human rights and democracy were soft-headed, bleeding-heart causes. Trump, a man of business, was going to look out for the bottom line without getting tangled up in high-minded crusades. Now that's exactly what he's doing: using trade as a way to make grand statements about values—his own, if not America's. This is troubling on legal, moral, and diplomatic levels. The Constitution specifically delegates the power to levy tariffs to Congress, but legislators have delegated some of that capacity to the president. Trump has invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows him to impose tariffs in response to an 'unusual and extraordinary threat,' on the basis that Congress cannot act quickly enough. This use of the law is, as Conor Friedersdorf and Ilya Somin wrote in The Atlantic in May, absurd. The White House's months of vacillation on its tariff threats since make the idea of any emergency even less credible. Understanding why Trump would be sensitive about Bolsonaro's prosecution, which stems from Bolsonaro's attempt to cling to power after losing the 2022 election, is not difficult—the parallels between the two have been often noted—but that doesn't make it a threat to the United States, much less an 'unusual and extraordinary' one. Likewise, Canadian recognition of a Palestinian state is unwelcome news for Trump's close alliance with Israel, but it poses no obvious security or economic danger to the U.S. A Congress or Supreme Court interested in limiting presidential power could seize on these statements to arrest Trump's trade war, but these are not the legislators or justices we have. Setting aside the legal problems, Trump's statements about Brazil and Canada represent an abandonment of the realpolitik approach he once promised. Even if Carney were to back down on Palestinian statehood, or Brazil to call off Bolsonaro's prosecution, the United States wouldn't see any economic gain. Trump is purely using American economic might to achieve noneconomic goals. Previous presidents have frequently used U.S. economic hegemony to further national goals—or, less charitably, interfered in the domestic affairs of other sovereign nations. But no one needs to accept any nihilistic false equivalences. Trump wrote in a July 9 letter to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva that the case against Bolsonaro was 'an international disgrace' and (naturally) a 'Witch Hunt.' Although the U.S. has taken steps to isolate repressive governments, Trump's attempts to bail out Bolsonaro are nothing of the sort. The U.S. can't with a straight face argue that charging Bolsonaro is improper, and it can't accuse Brazil of convicting him in a kangaroo court, because no trial has yet been held. The U.S. government has also long used its power to bully other countries into taking its side in international disputes, but the swipe at Canada is perplexing. The Trump administration remains the most stalwart ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (notwithstanding some recent tensions), and the U.S. government has long withheld recognition of any Palestinian state as leverage in negotiations. Even so, slapping tariffs on Canada for a symbolic decision such as this seems unlikely to dissuade Carney or do anything beyond further stoking nascent Canadian nationalism. This is not the only way in which Trump's blunt wielding of tariffs is likely to backfire on the United States. Consumers in the U.S. will pay higher prices, and overseas, Jerusalem Demsas warned in April, 'the credibility of the nation's promises, its treaties, its agreements, and even its basic rationality has evaporated in just weeks.' But it's not just trust with foreign countries that the president has betrayed. It's the pact he made with voters. Trump promised voters an 'America First' approach. Instead, they're getting a 'Bolsonaro and Netanyahu First' government. Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Virginia Giuffre's family was shocked that Trump described her as 'stolen.' Every scientific empire comes to an end. Hamas wants Gaza to starve. Today's News President Donald Trump's tariffs are set to take effect tomorrow as his administration scrambles to finalize trade deals with key partners. Mexico received a 90-day extension, while other countries, including China and Canada, remain in negotiations. Steve Witkoff, Trump's special envoy to the Middle East, and Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee will visit Gaza tomorrow to inspect aid distribution as the humanitarian crisis worsens in the region. Dispatches Evening Read By Katherine J. Wu For decades, evolutionary biologists pointed to such examples to cast hybridization as hapless—'rare, very unsuccessful, and not an important evolutionary force,' Sandra Knapp, a plant taxonomist at the Natural History Museum in London, told me. But recently, researchers have begun to revise that dour view. With the right blend of genetic material, hybrids can sometimes be fertile and spawn species of their own; they can acquire new abilities that help them succeed in ways their parents never could. Which, as Knapp and her colleagues have found in a new study, appears to be the case for the world's third-most important staple crop: The 8-to-9-million-year-old lineage that begat the modern potato may have arisen from a chance encounter between a flowering plant from a group called Etuberosum and … an ancient tomato. Tomatoes, in other words, can now justifiably be described as the mother of potatoes. More From The Atlantic Take a look. These photos capture moments from the 2025 World Aquatics Championships in Singapore, where more than 2,500 athletes from over 200 nations competed in events spanning six aquatic sports.
Time Magazine
2 minutes ago
- Time Magazine
Why Trump Is Reviving the Presidential Fitness Test
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday reviving the Presidential Fitness Test, the once-ubiquitous school program that for more than five decades had American children running miles, doing sit-ups, and stretching at least twice a year during gym class. The announcement is part of the Trump Administration's push to address 'crisis levels' of childhood obesity, sedentary behavior, and poor nutrition after Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released a report in May warning that American children are suffering from chronic diseases at an accelerating rate, largely due to inactivity. 'This was a wonderful tradition, and we're bringing it back,' Trump said at the signing ceremony flanked by a group of prominent and often controversial athletes, including Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker and former NFL linebacker Lawrence Taylor. 'This is an important step in our mission to Make America Healthy Again… What we're doing is very important.' The program, which was retired by President Barack Obama in 2012, involved testing students aged 6-17 on a series of exercises designed to measure strength, endurance and flexibility, including a timed mile run, push-ups or pull-ups, sit-ups and the sit-and-reach stretch. For decades, those who scored in the top percentiles received a Presidential Physical Fitness Award, while others were given a patch or certificate for participation. The revival has already sparked debate among educators and health experts. While some praise the Administration for putting national attention on youth fitness, others warn that the Presidential Fitness Test risks humiliating students who are unable to meet the criteria, potentially fostering a culture of body shaming in schools. Research has found that concerns about body image can emerge as early as age 3, and may become worse over time. But supporters of the move argue that a national standard can motivate students. 'We need to re-instill that spirit of competition and that spirit and that commitment to nutrition and physical fitness,' Kennedy said at the signing ceremony. 'For me, it was a huge item of pride when I was growing up.' Vice President J.D. Vance framed the initiative as part of a broader cultural shift: 'I think all of us have thought at one point in the last few years that kids spend a little too much time on their phones, maybe a little bit too much time in front of the TV,' Vance said Thursday. 'We just want kids to do better. We want them to be healthier.' Here's what to know about the Presidential Fitness Test program. What Is the Presidential Fitness Test? For more than five decades, the Presidential Fitness Test was a staple in public schools: children would complete a series of physical activities that measured strength, agility, and flexibility at least twice a year during gym class. Those activities included running one mile, sit-ups, pull ups, shuttle run, and the sit-and-reach. Students who scored at or above the 85th percentile in all of the tests could earn the Presidential Physical Fitness Award—a patch or certificate bearing the presidential seal, meant to inspire national pride and personal excellence. President Dwight D. Eisenhower first initiated the fitness test when he created the President's Council on Youth Fitness in 1956 after a study revealed that 58% of American children failed at least one of six exercise tests, such as sit-ups, while only 8.7% of European children failed at least one of the same tests. Sports Illustrated at the time called it 'The Report That Shocked the President.' 'Recent studies, both private and public, have revealed disturbing deficiencies in the fitness of American youth,' Eisenhower's executive order read. 'Since the youth of our Nation is one of the greatest of our assets, it is imperative that the fitness of our youth be improved and promoted to the greatest possible extent.' President John F. Kennedy then built on Eisenhower's efforts to create a 'more completely fit American youth,' writing in a Sports Illustrated piece called 'The Soft American' that kids' poor physical fitness was a 'menace' to national security. 'He was lamenting the fact that America had prided itself on a beef jerky toughness, and that we were losing—that we were falling behind Europeans, we were falling behind other nations,' his nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at the White House on Thursday. The fitness council created under Eisenhower then formalized the Presidential Physical Fitness Award Program under President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966. 'It is essential that our young people develop their physical capabilities as well as their mental skills,' Johnson said in a statement announcing the awards program. 'Sports and other forms of active play promote good health and help provide our country with sturdy young citizens equal to the challenges of the future.' When and Why Did the Test Go Away? The Presidential Fitness Test was phased out during the Obama Administration in 2012 and replaced with the Presidential Youth Fitness Program, a more individualized assessment that provided 'training and resources to schools for assessing, tracking, and recognizing youth fitness,' according to an HHS website about the program. Schools that adopted the program gained access to web-based tests, standards to testing, calculators for aerobic capacity and body composition, and online training. The initiative measured student fitness with an assessment called the FitnessGram, which measured aerobic capacity, body composition, flexibility, muscle strength, and muscular endurance. The shift came amid growing concerns about the Presidential Fitness Test's psychological impact on children and a broader pivot in public health thinking. Rather than rewarding top scorers, the new program emphasized 'personal bests' and offered resources to help educators and parents promote lifelong physical activity. HHS said that the Obama-era model aimed to 'minimize comparisons between children' and foster more inclusive approaches to health education. 'The new program has moved away from recognizing athletic performance to providing a barometer on student's health,' the HHS website read. 'The program minimizes comparisons between children and instead supports students as they pursue personal fitness goals for lifelong health.' Why Is Trump Bringing It Back? The Trump Administration says the move addresses what it calls 'crisis levels' of childhood obesity, sedentary behavior, and poor nutrition. A May report from the Department of Health and Human Services—led by Kennedy—warned that American children are suffering from chronic diseases at an accelerating rate, largely due to inactivity and poor diet. That report called for a nationwide campaign to combat what Kennedy described as a 'health emergency.' 'American youth have seen a steady decline in activity and cardiorespiratory fitness over decades, contributing to rising obesity, diabetes, mental health disorders, and cardiometabolic risks,' the report said, noting a study from the Physical Activity Alliance that found that more than 70% of children aged 6-17, or 85% in just teenagers, did not meet the 2024 federal minimum recommendation of daily moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. In addition to reintroducing the test, Trump's order directs the President's Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition to develop criteria for the new Presidential Fitness Award and create school programs that reward excellence in physical education. Golfer Bryson DeChambeau will serve as the council's chairman. Trump has often referred to himself as a sports enthusiast. He frequently attends major sporting events and on Thursday said he was 'always a person that loved playing sports.' 'I was good at sports,' Trump said. 'When you were really focused on sports, you thought about nothing else… This is one of the reasons I like golf. You get away for a couple of hours.'
