Applying for financial aid looks like it’ll be a much less bumpy process for college-bound students and their parents this coming academic year compared to the glitch-filled debacle that roiled the higher education world in 2024.
The Department of Education opened its latest version of the Free Application For Student Aid — better known as the FAFSA — to the public last week, slightly ahead of its original Dec. 1 deadline. The early debut appeared to be a sign of confidence that the agency had mostly worked out the many technical bugs that marred last year’s rollout of a simplified version of the form, which millions of students fill out annually.
Organizations that work with families and financial aid administrators told Yahoo Finance that the FAFSA does mostly appear to be working as intended this time around, with some students reporting that the process only took 10 or 15 minutes to complete.
Still, they said that the form could still use some tweaking.
“We are feeling good that students can go in and can apply for financial aid, which last year they couldn’t,” said Jill Desjean, a senior policy analyst at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “Are we saying everything is perfect and there is no work to be done? No, there is still work to be done.”
Last year’s botched FAFSA process has been a lingering embarrassment for President Biden’s Department of Education, which was tasked with revamping the form under legislation passed by Congress in 2020. The bill reduced the number of questions on the application from 108 to a maximum of 36 while exempting some families from needing to report their assets, among other changes. That prompted the department to undertake a top-down rebuild of the ancient database systems used to manage its financial aid program, a difficult task that led to a host of technical problems.
Many students found they were unable to complete the form when it finally rolled out several months late, and millions of calls to the department’s understaffed customer service center went unanswered. With students left in limbo, some schools were forced to roll back their acceptance deadlines. A Government Accountability Office report noted that the problems also appear to have contributed to 9% fewer first-time applicants submitting FAFSAs, “with the largest declines among lower-income students.”
For the newly updated form, the Biden administration undertook several rounds of beta testing to make sure its latest version of the form was working properly and catch last-minute bugs. On a press call last week, department officials said they had already processed 167,000 applications for the coming year, and that 95% of testers reported that they were “satisfied with the experience.” They said the agency also added 700 call center workers to field questions.
“I'm proud to say FAFSA is up and running, and millions more students can have access to federal aid to pursue their dreams,” Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona told reporters.
FAFSA website is seen onscreen as Adjovi Golo holds a laptop at DePaul University in Chicago. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh) ·ASSOCIATED PRESS
‘Overwhelmingly positive experiences’
Groups that work directly with students to complete the FAFSA told Yahoo Finance that the process has largely been going smoothly.
William Wozniak, vice president of marketing at INvestED, described it as “infinitely better” than last year’s application season. The student lender was one of the organizations tapped for beta testing and has since worked with hundreds of additional families to finish the form, he said.
“So many of the glitches that were experienced last time were not occurring, where the form would lock up or the form would go down,” Wozniak said. “It just got so much better.”
One of the groups worst affected by last year’s problems was students with undocumented parents who lacked Social Security numbers. The department’s automatic system was often unable to verify their identities, forcing them to send in documentation for a lengthy manual verification process. Education officials announced a temporary fix in the spring, which they extended to the coming year.
Alyssa Samuel, a staffer at the Scholarship Fund for Alexandria, in Alexandria, Va., said that the process has been vastly easier for the large number of students in such mixed-status families her organization, which was also involved in beta testing, works with.
“We’ve had overwhelmingly positive experiences with the application,” she said, later adding that “we’re not really pulling our hair out.”
Still, some student aid officials and parents have run into glitches. NASFAA’s Desjean said there still appear to be problems with some of the FAFSA’s prompts and that some graduate students continue to receive messages informing them they might be eligible for Pell grants, which only undergraduates can actually apply for.
The new FAFSA is also supposed to be able to automatically port over a parent’s tax information, sparing them the hassle of manually inputting it line by line. David Merryman, a professor at Vanderbilt University, said the tool didn’t work when he went to help his daughter fill out the application.
Even so, he said the process was relatively straightforward and only took 35 minutes total. “We had heard how terrible it was so we were really worried about it,” he said. “But it was really easy.”
The tax importing tool didn’t seem to work either for Jelena Subotic, a mother in Atlanta, who said she gave up on the form after it crashed 30 minutes into filling in her portion. She said she’d noticed it had also flipped her son’s and husband’s Social Security numbers. She plans to try again in a couple of weeks.
“I’m just thinking it’ll be fixed in time so I can get it done,” she said. “But it is annoying — I wasted half an hour.”
Jordan Weissmann is a senior reporter at Yahoo Finance.
