Hundreds of thousands of students who applied for federal aid to pay for college are now at risk of endless delays as enrollment deadlines approach, thanks to a new miscalculation by the Department of Education. .
The Office of Federal Student Aid, the agency that administers the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), said Friday that its system does not include all the data fields to correctly calculate aid based on students' reported assets. announced that the application would need to be reprocessed. Sent back to school.
This is the latest disaster in this year's glitch-plagued overhaul of the FAFSA, which was supposed to streamline the application process but instead resulted in millions of dollars in hassle.
“At this stage in the game, and after so many delays, every mistake adds up and we are unable to make our post-secondary dreams a reality,” said President and CEO Justin Drager. This will be felt keenly by all students who rely on need-based financial aid.” from the National Association of Student Aid Administrators said in a statement Friday.
The Department of Education did not say how long it would take to reprocess affected applications, but said that although the miscalculation had been resolved, the Department had been sending out inaccurate information until Thursday. . In a year in which at least 6 million FAFSAs have been filed, about 200,000 of the more than 1.5 million applications already processed were affected.
A spokesperson for the agency said the agency would continue to provide universities with a “large amount” of student support information. “We remain focused on supporting students and families through this process and supporting universities to submit offers of aid as quickly as possible,” the spokesperson said.
In light of recent hurdles, officials are providing schools with a Student Aid Index (SAI) that allows them to estimate an applicant's potential aid amount, rather than waiting for delayed FAFSA documents to be fully processed. It advised schools to use the numbers to create interim financial aid packages.
The system is already months behind schedule as authorities scramble to iron out technical glitches in online forms, process applications and get financial aid packages out into the world. Officials said they are working to fully increase the throughput to get applicant information to schools. Once this is complete, “we expect it to take approximately two additional weeks to process all applications that have already been submitted,” officials said on March 12.
This year's new FAFSA was supposed to be easier than ever. The number of questions has been reduced from over 100 to around 20, depending on the applicant. But since its launch on Dec. 30, the site has been plagued by problems, with many applicants spending hours or even days of unsuccessful attempts just to log in and begin filling out forms. reported that it did. For those who successfully applied, an early miscalculation left out inflation adjustments for all applicants.
Although the FAFSA is typically processed within hours or days, millions of people rely on it for up to a few hours to find out how much money the federal government is putting into their education for the upcoming school year. I've been waiting for several months. Delays complicate college decisions for families who rely on financial aid to pay for college. The national determination date is normally May 1st, but due to the FAFSA postponement, many universities have pushed the deadline back to June.
Tiana Alonzo and her daughter Scarlett Belle Martinez, who will be a college freshman this fall, filed the FAFSA on Jan. 5 and waited several months to hear back. Alonzo, a single mother who lives in Murrieta, California, said she would not be able to afford her daughter's dream school without financial aid. Their information was finally processed last weekend.
“As soon as she saw it, she started crying,” Alonzo said of her daughter. “She was like, 'I can go to college.' As her parent, it broke her heart to know that she was that scared.”
But the two remain at an impasse. The universities Martinez wants to attend have not yet received financial aid information from the Department of Education, so she has not been able to send her a formal financial aid offer.
