Thousands of California community college financial aid recipients may not receive grants for their tuition this semester.

According to a report by the California Assembly, approximately 20,000 students lost their chance to compete for a Cal Grant, a governmental grant that provides students with free tuition, when their colleges failed to report their grades to the California Aid Commission by Sept 2.

“This didn’t effect students at Cerritos College because we file ours electronically,” said Jamie Quiroz financial aid accounting technician at Cerritos College. “We submitted over 8500 applications to the aid commission.”

Although this did not effect the financial aid program at Cerritos College, many schools throughout southern California that do not have the software to file applications electronically were strongly impacted.

Two dozen schools in Los Angeles county and every college in Orange and Ventura counties submitted only a small number of grade reports to the commission, causing their remaining students to be omitted from the qualification process.

Community college officials site the outdated computer software as a reason for the omitted submissions.

Cal Grant administrators plan to ask the state legislature for $11 million to go toward software that enable community colleges to eliminate this problem by filing applications online.

Although this was the biggest roadblock in the qualification process, for many students it wasn’t the only one.

This year community college employees had to calculate grade point averages only for courses whose units transferred to universities.

Because their computers were not equipped with the proper software, employees had to do it manually, which drastically cut down on the number of applications that were sent.

Paul Mitchell, legislative analyst for the Higher Education Committee was outraged at the community college system’s neglect. “We’ve got some of the neediest and highest achieving students not receiving grants just because their mentors decided to pull them out of the competition,” he said.

Officials also site student neglect as a reason for the low numbers.

The Student Aid Commission allows either a college or a student to submit a grade report.

Many students are unaware of this and rely on the college to do it for them.

Following the assembly report, the Student Aid commission reopened the competition for hopeful applicants so that its remaining 750 grants could be distributed properly.

The new deadline was Oct. 15, and the grants are expected to be distributed in November.