As high school seniors begin to hear back from colleges in the coming weeks, many have been left in financial limbo due to technical glitches in the revised Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form. In an effort to simplify and “streamline” the form, which included 103 labor-intensive questions, Congress passed the FAFSA Simplification Act in 2020. The revisions also sought to expand eligibility for student financial aid and Pell Grants.
However, when the online form was released in late December, students encountered technical glitches, misleading error messages and screens abruptly locking. Traditionally, the FAFSA application opens in October but was delayed this year when the Education Department failed to provide the revised form by the deadline. As the financial gateway for millions of students seeking to attend higher education institutions, the Education Department’s failure to release a more straightforward and comprehensive form shows a lack of preparation and foresight.
When the application launched on Dec. 30, it was only available sporadically as parents and students overloaded the FAFSA website in hopes of completing their forms before it closed.
Although the Education Department reported that “more than 500,000 FAFSA applications were submitted in the first week,” millions of other students experienced difficulty with completing their applications. According to the National College Attainment Network, the number of submitted financial aid forms dropped by 1.5 million from last year. The incomplete and unsubmitted FAFSA applications are mainly from the students most affected by the technical glitches and errors — first-generation students with undocumented parents.
In previous years, parents without a Social Security number had the option of mailing their information to the Education Department or completing the paper version of the form. However, students cannot submit the revised FAFSA online if the Social Security number box is left blank. When these students called the FAFSA support center for help, they were either abruptly dropped from the line or unable to communicate their questions due to a lack of multilingual staff.
Nearly half of FAFSA applicants are first-generation college students, and many must navigate the college admissions process independently. Thus, the Education Department showed a lack of forethought and preparation when they failed to anticipate that large numbers of these students would have parents without Social Security numbers and would need bilingual assistance.
The most unfortunate part of this debacle is that students won’t know or receive their financial aid awards until late March. The Education Department announced that it would take weeks for schools to receive student data rather than the usual few days. In response, the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) announced they would extend their decision deadline to May 15. Given that schools have had less time to prepare financial aid packages, first-year students, in turn, also have less than a month to commit to a campus. The FAFSA complications have undoubtedly worsened a very stressful and overwhelming time for students.
Facing intense criticism and in their defense, the Education Department stated FAFSA had “less funding than anticipated would be needed to complete the job correctly and on time.” While this may be true, the Education Department had three years to plan, prepare and complete the necessary changes to its financial aid form. The technical glitches with Social Security numbers and lack of sufficient bilingual support personnel reveal that the Education Department failed to understand the challenges some students would face completing the revised form and the support they would need to complete it in a compressed time frame. If the Education Department needed more money or time to launch the revised form successfully, the release of the revised FAFSA should have been postponed by a year.
Last week, the Education Department announced a workaround for students with undocumented parents. Those unable to complete the form will receive an “incomplete” notification to be “corrected” later. According to reports, a final resolution to the technical glitch will be finalized by next month. While it is commendable that the Education Department will address these problems, they never should have occurred in the first place. The path to higher education, particularly figuring out how to pay for it, is already difficult enough. The revised FAFSA was supposed to be an easier experience for the most vulnerable students. Unfortunately, the revised FAFSA has done the opposite.
