Will This Be One other Disastrous Yr for the FAFSA?

Brace your self. As soon as once more, it’s the season for the Free Software for Federal Scholar Help.

If you happen to had purchasers who grappled with the 2024-2025 FAFSA, which is the federal monetary help utility that tens of millions of households full yearly, you’d know what an utter debacle it was.

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Among the many issues plaguing the FAFSA final cycle was:

• Greater than a two-month delay in launching the FAFSA.
• Woefully insufficient buyer name facilities to discipline the tens of millions of calls from pissed off candidates.
• Dozens of software program glitches that made it extraordinarily troublesome for a lot of dad and mom to finish the applying.
• An final discount within the variety of first-time FAFSA applicant completers who have been too intimidated to strive tackling the applying or gave up attempting.
• A chaotic disruption of the admission course of for the nation’s schools and universities.

Whereas officers with the U.S. Division of Training try to guarantee households, schools and Capitol Hill that issues can be totally different for the 2025-2026 12 months, comprehensible skepticism stays.

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The primary signal that one thing was amiss got here in August when the DOE introduced that the FAFSA rollout can be delayed for the second 12 months in a row.

Historically, the FAFSA launch date is Oct. 1, which is very useful for college students who can be making use of early determination or early motion for colleges. Faculties need to have the ability to course of these college students help functions earlier than they assemble help packages.

Final 12 months, the FAFSA wasn’t launched till the top of December after saying it will be out there someday that month. But even when it was launched, solely a tiny fraction of households may efficiently entry it and completion numbers have been dramatically down for months after that.

This time round, the roll-out date is scheduled for Dec. 1. We’ll see if that date holds true.

One purpose for hope this 12 months is that the DOE has added considerably extra individuals to the FAFSA name heart. Current GAO findings on the FAFSA debacle confirmed that 74% of the 5.4 million calls positioned to the FAFSA name heart weren’t answered final season. Inexplicably, the GAO auditors famous the variety of individuals manning the FAFSA telephones was truly decrease than the earlier 12 months, though the FAFSA had undergone a dramatic variety of adjustments.

In case your purchasers encounter bother with the newest FAFSA, the Federal Scholar Help assist quantity is (800) 433-3243. If you happen to go to the FSA website, you too can search assist by way of a reside chat.

The GAO audit additionally discovered that greater than 40 technical points hobbled the preliminary rollout of the FAFSA kind. These included issues that blocked some college students from finishing the applying—or, in some circumstances, prevented them from beginning it. Different points embrace deleting info candidates entered into the shape, offering faulty error messages and offering incorrect estimates of scholars’ eligibility for federal help.

One other space of focus was on the management inside the pupil help forms. The division skilled a substantial amount of turnover, together with within the pupil help workplace’s place of chief info officer. Since 2021, the place has modified 5 occasions, and the position nonetheless doesn’t have a everlasting individual.

Final 12 months’s points brought about some college students’ Scholar Help Index, which is generated by info households present on the FAFSA, as effectively robotically by way of the Inside Income Service, to spit out incorrect outcomes. This brought about some households to wrongly assume that they’d be eligible for extra monetary help, whereas others have been led to consider the other.

If you happen to aren’t accustomed to the time period, the Scholar Help Index (SAI) has changed the Anticipated Household Contribution (EFC). SAI and its EFC predecessor signify what the monetary help formulation has decided a family ought to be capable of pay, at minimal, for one 12 months of faculty.

One technique to double-check an SAI generated by the FAFSA is to make use of the Federal Scholar Help Estimator earlier than the FAFSA is obtainable. This calculator estimates a pupil’s federal help and generates a preliminary SAI.

If the SAIs generated by the FAFSA and the estimator differ by greater than a minor quantity, it’s value investigating. The FAFSA software program may need produced the incorrect SAI. Alternatively, your shopper may have brought about that discrepancy by inputting the incorrect figures with both technique.

At a congressional listening to in September, U.S. Home of Representatives members on either side of the aisle, in addition to GAO officers who testified, expressed skepticism concerning the issues being fastened for the brand new FAFSA season.  

What’s ironic about what has transpired in the course of the previous 12 months is {that a} key intention of Congress when it handed laws to simplify the FAFSA was to encourage extra college students to use for help. Nonetheless, because the GAO famous, “Reasonably than simplifying entry to pupil monetary help—one of many division’s strategic targets—the FAFSA rollout created roadblocks for some college students and their households.”

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