Alabama community and technical college students who completed federal financial aid forms will start to receive notice of their award packages this week, officials said Tuesday.

About half of community college students in the state should be eligible for some aid. The letters will come as colleges across the country continue to work through a massive backlog of applications caused by a delayed rollout of the new FAFSA. The federal form, which aimed to simplify the application process, was plagued by delays and errors months after its launch in December.

In its latest update on June 8, the U.S. Department of Education said application rates were down by about 10% nationwide compared to last year. Officials were still working with schools at the time to reprocess applications that had errors.

“The benefit Alabama has of an entire community college system is that there’s a team of individuals, all over the state, who are less focused on the problems and more focused on the solutions that help students and their families reach their goals in higher education,” Chancellor Jimmy Baker said in a news release Tuesday. “I applaud the efforts of our System Office and our colleges to ensure that students who are eligible for aid now have the notification they need to effectively plan their academic schedules for the fall.”

Experts say students are missing out on billions of dollars in free money if they don’t fill out the form, which doesn’t just qualify students for Pell Grants, but can open the door for other kinds of scholarships and work-study opportunities.

Community college students stand to benefit most from the program, federal data shows.

More than half, 55%, of Alabama two-year college students and 32% of public four-year college students were Pell-eligible in 2021-22, according to the latest federal data. The average Pell Grant amount – $5,464 for all Alabama students – is typically enough to cover the cost of community college tuition in the state.

Alabama requires high school students to fill out the FAFSA in order to graduate, but more families opted to request waivers this year. As of Tuesday, just 52% of Alabama high school seniors completed the FAFSA – down from 64% last year.

Just a couple of months ago, the difference was even more stark: Just one in three students had completed the form by the end of the school year.

Higher education officials told AL.com at the time that they were working on a number of efforts to get completion rates up and process packages quickly, including holding workshops for high school counselors and trainings for staff at local community colleges.

The Alabama Community College System’s Reporting and Enterprise Application Support team assembled each of the 24 colleges’ financial aid packages, allowing local financial aid offices more time to serve students and host community outreach, according to Tuesday’s announcement from the system about coming aid packages.

“Our goal of serving the community is truly achieved by all efforts on our campuses, and we appreciate the support from the System Office when it came to handling the FAFSA process in a way that helped us keep our focus on the students,” Laticia Dubose, director of financial aid for Enterprise State Community College, said in the release.

The students who will be notified this week have already applied to their local community college and listed the college on the FAFSA. Students should receive the information through their student portals and/or email accounts.

Students who have yet to apply to a community college for the fall semester will receive their award letters after they complete the college application of their choice and add the college to the FAFSA form.