Hundreds of thousands of students who applied for federal aid to pay for college now risk potentially open-ended delays as enrollment deadlines loom, thanks to another miscalculation by the Department of Education.
The agency’s Federal Student Aid office, which administers the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), announced Friday that its system didn’t include all data fields to correctly calculate aid based on the assets students reported, requiring their applications to be reprocessed and resent to schools.
It’s the latest snafu in this year’s glitch-ridden FAFSA overhaul, which was supposed to streamline the application process but has snarled it for millions instead.
“At this stage in the game and after so many delays, every error adds up and will be felt acutely by every student who is counting on need-based financial aid to make their postsecondary dreams a reality,” Justin Draeger, the president and CEO of the National Association of Financial Student Aid Administrators, said in a statement Friday.
The Department of Education, which didn’t disclose how long it would take to reprocess the impacted applications, said that the miscalculation has been resolved but that the agency was sending out inaccurate information until as recently as Thursday. It indicated roughly 200,000 applications were affected out of the more than 1.5 million it has already processed — in a year when at least 6 million FAFSAs have been submitted so far.
An agency spokesperson said officials would continue to deliver “large volumes” of student aid information to universities in the days ahead. “We remain focused on helping students and families through this process and supporting colleges produce aid offers as quickly as possible,” the spokesperson said.
In light of the latest snag, authorities have advised schools to use applicants’ Student Aid Index (SAI) number, which can estimate an applicant’s possible aid amount, to create tentative financial aid packages rather than wait for delayed FAFSA forms to be fully processed.
The system is already months behind schedule as authorities race to clean up technical glitches with the online form, process applications and push financial aid packages out the door. Authorities have said they’re working to fully ramp up their processing volumes to deliver the applicant information to schools. Once this has happened, “We anticipate that it will take about two additional weeks to process all applications that have already been submitted,” officials said on March 12.
This year’s new FAFSA was supposed to be easier than ever. It reduced the number of questions from over 100 to about 20, depending on the applicant. But problems have plagued the site since its launch on Dec. 30, when many applicants reported trying unsuccessfully for hours and even days just to log on and start filling out a form. For those who succeeded in filing applications, an early miscalculation left out inflation adjustments for everyone who had applied.
FAFSAs are usually processed within hours or days, but millions have waited up to several months to learn how much money the federal government is putting toward their education for the upcoming school year. The delays complicate college decisions for families that rely on financial aid to pay for college. While National Decision Day is typically May 1, many universities have pushed their deadlines into June due to the FAFSA hold up.
Tiana Alonzo and her daughter, Scarlette-Belle Martinez, who will be an incoming college freshman this fall, submitted a FAFSA on Jan. 5 and waited months to hear back. Alonzo, a single mother in Murrieta, California, said she couldn’t afford her daughter’s dream school without financial aid. Finally, last weekend, their information was processed.
“The second she saw it, she started crying,” Alonzo said of her daughter. “She was like, ‘I can go to college.’ As a parent, to know that that’s how scared she was, it was breaking my heart.”
But the two are still stuck in limbo. The university Martinez is hoping to attend still hasn’t received her financial aid information from the Department of Education, so it hasn’t been able to send her an official financial aid offer.
