Aid can’t be processed on time, most colleges say
There’s more bad news for high school seniors anxiously awaiting financial aid packages along with college acceptance letters: Two-thirds of colleges and universities polled in a new survey said they don’t think they’ll be able to successfully process student financial aid data in the next few weeks. And fewer than half of them are adjusting their decision deadlines.
Those were among the problems detailed in a letter sent to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona Thursday by the American Council on Education and other organizations that surveyed more than 350 colleges and universities on how they’re handling the repeated delays to this year’s new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.
A few weeks isn’t enough to dig through the complicated records, most schools said.
The glaring admission confirms widespread fears that the bungled rollout of the new form would affect millions of students. It shows how crucial April will be for financial aid offices, especially at institutions that haven’t yet joined the growing list of schools pushing back their decision cutoffs.
Because of the glitches and backlogs, administrators worry the incoming data will overload institutions at a time students are relying on their financial aid offers to make life-changing decisions.
Even Cardona is pleading with governors to extend their statewide financial aid deadlines beyond the beginning of May, after the department said this week students won’t be able to make corrections to their FAFSA forms until the “first half of April.”
The revamped FAFSA, which was congressionally mandated, will make hundreds of thousands more low-income students eligible for financial aid, according to the Education Department.
But its rollout has been plagued with problems. In the latest blunder just a week ago, the Education Department
The glaring admission confirms widespread fears that the bungled rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid would affect millions of students.
acknowledged it miscalculated data for hundreds of thousands of students – a mistake it blamed on an outside vendor and said has since been fixed.
The survey also pointed to technical issues with a mailbox system the Education Department developed to share FAFSA info with colleges. Many colleges struggled to connect and update the software and get customer service from the department.
The Biden administration’s limited transparency about its behind-thescenes struggles have dramatically eroded trust between the federal government, colleges and students in the last few months.
As the Education Department works to clear a backlog of roughly 2 million applications, colleges are urging federal officials to be as straightforward as possible about any more potential hiccups.
“If they have observed some issues that are going to need to be fixed in some way, we’ve asked them to release whatever it is that they know – like now,” said Karen McCarthy, with the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, in a podcast interview.
On Friday, the Education Department said it would ease the deadlines for new oversight regulations set to go into effect later this year. “This adjusted timeline allows institutions to focus their efforts on getting aid to students this spring,” the agency said.