Free Application For Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is the government form that must be filled out by high school seniors in order to receive financial aid for college. Like most government forms, it can be difficult and confusing.
CUH Accounting and Marketing students work together to help high school students and their parents file the FAFSA forms.
Learn about the background of the FAFSA Service-Learning Project.
Accounting Students
CUH Accounting students act as counselors in helping high school students and their parents file FAFSA. This involves applying their knowledge of both accounting principles and tax concepts since FAFSA requires tax and other financial data to be reported. The high school students often present challenging situations that do not fit neatly in the FAFSA format, so the accounting students must be very knowledgeable. It puts their book learning to the real world test!
Marketing Students
CUH Marketing students joined the project to help improve the counseling process and to promote it so that more high school students take advantage of this project. It puts the CUH students’ marketing expertise to the test, as they try to reach a target market that can be notoriously difficult.
All accounting and all marketing students participate in the FAFSA project in their upper level major courses. It is simply the vehicle through which the course content is taught. This ongoing participation makes it possible for students to see for themselves the positive results that occur as a result of their hard work.
The project has been carried out several times at Kaimuki High School. Each year the process has been improved and an increasing number of high school students have wanted to participate. Several CUH students who have participated in the FAFSA project have made presentations about the project at both local and mainland conferences.
The FAFSA project has gone “on the road.” The CUH students have taken their FAFSA project to Molokai and have also started to research other high schools that might be appropriate partners for the FAFSA project.
