Education Dept., hoping to avoid another disaster, to test FAFSA form in fall

The Biden administration faces a huge test this fall as high school seniors and their families wait to see if the college financial aid form is functional or a debacle like last year’s form, which was supposed to offer a simplified process but only delivered misery.

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, will not be widely available until December, meaning the Department of Education will miss the traditional start date of October for a second year in a row.

Instead, the department plans to beta-test the FAFSA form with thousands of students beginning in October.

It’s an attempt to fix any glitches in the system before it goes live for all high school seniors who want to apply for financial aid before committing to colleges in the spring.

“Their hope is to get through the beta testing to get a lot of those bugs and flaws worked out before it opens in the beginning of December,” said MorraLee Keller, senior director of strategic programming at the nonprofit National College Attainment Network. “It should create a much better form and a much better user experience for everyone who needs the FAFSA for the 2024-2025 academic year.”

The FAFSA form is used to decide how much families can pay toward college and to help schools figure out how much financial assistance to offer. It’s often the difference between a low-income or middle-class student attending college or staying home.

Congress ordered the Education Department to streamline FAFSA in a 2020 law. Yet the rollout last winter and spring was a disaster, with students struggling to complete applications and schools complaining they got junk data back from the feds. Some eligible students got flustered and never applied.

“People just gave up because the process was so cumbersome and difficult and frustrating,” Ms. Keller said.

While federal education officials blamed the glitches, in part, on inadequate funding to administer the program, GOP lawmakers accused Mr. Biden of diverting Education Department staff from the congressionally mandated FAFSA overhaul to his loan forgiveness plan.

“It is unacceptable that for the second year in a row, the Biden-Harris administration will be late in making FAFSA available for students,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, Louisiana Republican and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, told The Washington Times. “This administration should be focused on ensuring students get the financial aid they need to afford college, not enacting its irresponsible student loan policies designed to buy votes before the November election.”

The Department of Education said it will work with community-based organizations (CBOs), high schools, institutions of higher education, states and “limited groups of students and contributors” to fill out and submit the form during the testing period in early fall.

“This testing period aligns with software industry best practices, to identify and resolve the kind of system errors that can derail students, contributors, and institutions,” a department spokesperson said.

The damage from last year’s fumble is tangible.

NCAN data show a 9.3% drop in the number of FAFSA forms completed nationally by the 2024 high school class, compared to the 2023 class.

Stressed-out parents and students were flummoxed by error messages and an inability to access their online FAFSA forms. Families who typically received financial aid offers in early April had to wait until much deeper in the spring.

The updated FAFSA system also struggled to handle some types of applications, such as those from students whose parents are in the country illegally.

In March, the program acknowledged it was spitting out bad data from a vendor and would have to reprocess a large chunk of applications. A week later, the Education Department said it discovered another error involving IRS data and would have to reprocess some applications.

Education Department officials made some quick fixes, including a temporary workaround to allow illegal immigrants without Social Security numbers to apply for financial aid for their U.S.-born children.

The department also reduced verification requirements and suspended routine program reviews to confirm colleges meet the requirements for financial aid eligibility.

The Government Accountability Office is investigating what went wrong. While there was a laundry list of glitches, experts said the main issue was that the system wasn’t fully ready despite three years of planning for the congressionally mandated overhaul.

“It was still being built after it opened,” Ms. Keller said. “The system was not fully open.”

Rep. Virginia Foxx, North Carolina Republican and chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said students and colleges are “still reeling” from the problems.

“Needing yet another delay to ’fix’ issues for the second consecutive year reveals yet another layer of the department’s mismanagement of FASFA these past four years,” she said. “Clear communication has been sorely lacking and should be the bare minimum going forward. I’ll continue fighting for transparency and accountability until a complete and ready FAFSA actually materializes.”

• Stephen Dinan and Susan Ferrechio contributed to this report.