After stops and starts and some technological difficulties, the number of students submitting their Free Application for Federal Student Aid, FAFSA, is much lower this year than ever before.
Students still have time to submit their application to see what federal grants and loans they are eligible for until June 30.
There is a new version of FAFSA this year mandated by Congress. The new version was supposed to be simpler than the old version.
The new version is said to be easier and faster. The number of questions moved from a maximum of 108 to some applicants only answering 18 questions. Another goal of the new version was to make many more students eligible for federal financial aid.
According to the Department of Education’s (DOE) website, some of the new additions to the version include significantly reducing verification requirements, suspending new routine program reviews and providing additional flexibility on recertification.
They even deployed resources to help colleges handle the influx of applications such as adding federal personnel, which implies they will be “providing a broad set of colleges direct contact with financial aid experts to provide them personalized support based on the institution’s needs.”
The DOE was set to provide funding for technical assistance and support to schools who needed help on that side of things. In Feb., the DOE planned to send colleges test student financial aid records to prepare their systems to prepare accurate aid packages.
Instead, the rollout of the new version of FAFSA has been affected by delays, technical glitches and administrative mistakes.
The problems began when the new version was delayed and only made available to the public three months after its usual date of Oct. 1.
Colleges have just started receiving FAFSA information from students, due to last minute aid changes. Around 40% of applications were labeled as unusable by Justin Draeger, president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.
Last year, 50% of the class of 2023 high school seniors had completed their FAFSA forms by this time. This year, only 37% of this year’s class of high school seniors have completed their applications.
“This has been a challenging year. We’re not at the point we would like to be at,” James Kvaal, undersecretary at the Department of Education, said on a call with reporters earlier this week.
Some Republicans are arguing that Biden’s student loan forgiveness plans sidetracked the DOE and caused or exacerbated the mistakes.
Said U.S. Congresswoman Erin Houchin (R-IN): “After a botched rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), Biden’s Education Department dysfunction continues with a new report that nearly 330,000 applications will need to be reprocessed due to an issue with tax data. 5% of the over 6.6 million applications submitted so far have contained errors in IRS tax data, imported by the Department, that would make students eligible for less financial aid than they’re entitled to with an additional 10% gaining access to too much aid.”
The Biden administration requested that more funding from Congress would help control the rollout, but their requests were not met.
Students who benefit from the application have been affected by the rollout mistakes. Getting the applications into colleges is important so seniors can start making their decisions before May 1.