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A review by the Government Accountability Office reiterates what far too many students and their families already know: a new federal financial aid process was a disaster for far too many students, prompting hundreds of thousands of students to forgo the federal aid application, and perhaps college altogether.
The rollout last year of the updated Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) went so badly because the U.S. Department of Education released it without adequate testing and failed to have adequate support ready for applicants. In 2020, Congress passed the FAFSA Simplification Act, which required the Department of Education to roll out a new simplified FAFSA program by Jan. 1, 2024. The department tried to launch the new application by then, but it failed miserably.
The forms were available online only sporadically, technical glitches were prevalent and incorrect information was sent to some universities and colleges. The department was slow to get information to student applicants and help lines went largely unanswered.
As a result, according to one GAO report, the number of FAFSA forms submitted to the department dropped by more than 430,000, or 3 percent, over the previous year. The largest drop in applications was from low-income families. It is unclear if these students did not receive aid or did not attend college.
In a typical year, more than 17 million students fill out the FAFSA. The information they submit is used to determine financial aid from schools and the federal government. It is also used to determine eligibility for loans and work-study programs.
Because of the breakdown of the FAFSA system, colleges and universities nationwide, including the University of Maine System, implemented their own financial aid systems and changed deadlines to try to ensure that students received needed monetary support to continue their education.
“The Department’s failures have directly led to many young people foregoing a traditional college education, for no reason other than lack of affordability,” Sen. Susan Collins said in a press release last week. “In my time working at Husson University, I learned firsthand the devastating impact a failure of this sort has on Maine students and families — whose decision of whether to send their children to college, especially for aspiring first-generation college students, is directly tied to the costs of doing so. … Maine families cannot make significant financial decisions for their children if they do not know what student aid is being made available to them, and the leadership of the Department must answer for these unacceptable mistakes.”
Collins, a co-sponsor of the simplification act, was part of a more recent bipartisan group of senators that pushed for the GAO review of the FAFSA debacle.
While congressional hearings and correspondence have, rightly, put blame on the U.S. Department of Education for a botched rollout of an updated FAFSA, the department has said too little about how it will improve the situation. This year’s FAFSA forms, which should already be available to students and families, have again been delayed until December, to allow for more testing. The GAO revealed that the Department of Education pushed ahead with the new form without adequate testing while downplaying the difficulty of revamping the FAFSA system, which was incomplete.
In a statement released last month, the department said “it is committed to learning from challenges with the launch of the 2024–25 FAFSA form and making key improvements to the experience for students, families, and colleges in the coming year.”
That platitude, and the department’s pledges to do more testing and offer more resources to FAFSA applicants, is a bit late, given that this year’s form, which will help determine financial aid eligibility for students for the next school year, has already been delayed.
Some, including the administration of former President Donald Trump, have periodically suggested that the administration and oversight of FAFSA should be moved from the Department of Education, which is not a financial institution, to the Treasury Department. We don’t know if this will solve the current problems, but lawmakers should pursue all avenues to improving the administration of the federal student financial aid system to ensure it is truly streamlined without hurting students.
