Another FAFSA snafu could delay students’ financial aid even more
Hundreds of thousands of students risk open-ended delays as college enrollment deadlines loom, thanks to the latest Department of Education error.
Hundreds of thousands of students who applied for federal aid to pay for college now risk potentially open-ended delays as enrollment deadlines loom, thanks to another miscalculation by the Department of Education.
The agency’s Federal Student Aid office, which administers the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), announced Friday that its system didn’t include all data fields to correctly calculate aid based on the assets students reported, requiring their applications to be reprocessed and resent to schools.
It’s the latest snafu in this year’s glitch-ridden FAFSA overhaul, which was supposed to streamline the application process but has snarled it for millions instead.
“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,” Justin Draeger, the president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said in a statement Friday.
The Department of Education, which didn’t disclose how long it would take to reprocess the affected applications, said that the miscalculation has been resolved but that the agency was sending out inaccurate information until as recently as Thursday. It indicated roughly 200,000 applications were affected out of the more than 1.5 million it has already processed — in a year when at least 6 million FAFSAs have been submitted so far.
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