The U.S. Department of Education announced that it has discovered yet another “calculation error that caused the wrong information for several hundred thousand student financial aid applications to be sent to colleges this month and will need to reprocess them,” reports The College Fix. This is part of a series of errors made by the Biden administration that have cumulatively kept over 11 million students from submitting financial-aid forms, and resulted in students not knowing how much it will cost to attend a college, and colleges not knowing how much grants and scholarships to extend students.
These were “major mistakes made in reformulating the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, which was due earlier this year. The new glitch means that massive numbers of college applications will be further delayed, pushing the process in which colleges make financial aid offers to students back, perhaps by a couple of months.”
Generally, universities send financial aid decisions to students by March, and expect those students to decide whether to enroll by May 1. But this year, “only a small percentage of student FAFSA forms were sent to colleges by the government in time for that to happen.” Because of that failure by the government, it has suggested that schools extend their deadlines. “This is another unforced error that will likely cause more processing delays for students,” says Justin Draeger of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “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.”
As The College Fix notes,
This latest glitch comes on top of a year in which the FAFSA redesign….has come in late or unworkable at every stage…. the overhaul delayed the launch of the new application from October to late December. And then, when it launched, it was full of software bugs that made it impossible for many people to access the forms, according to various news reports.
The Education Department has had three years to do the overhaul.
The Government Accountability Office is investigating the disaster at the urging of Congressional Republicans, reports the New York Times.
As The College Fix notes,
In general, about 17 million students fill out the FAFSA, seeking financial aid from the colleges they are considering attending. This year, as of mid-March, the AP reported, only 5.5 million students have been able to fill out the new FAFSAs forms due to the technical blunders.
Advocates for students, and especially low income or first generation college students, have said they are worried that some, lacking any information about what they are expected to pay, will simply decide not to attend college, or not to attend it next fall.
For many others these delays mean that, realistically, they will be making their decisions about where to go in June and July. They may have been admitted to the college of their choice, but if they don’t have the financial aid information telling them the basic price of college, they can’t make a rational decision.
College admission experts have warned that is problematic for students, and just as problematic for colleges and universities, which need to know that they have a freshman class coming in, and who will be paying what.
For their part, colleges are delaying sending potential students the information they need, because they don’t have the FAFSA forms to process. Without knowing how much a student is going to get in federal aid, including Pell grants, schools have a hard time figuring out what the student should be paying out of standard tuition, and how much money in grants and scholarships the schools will need to offer.
