FAFSA chaos: How college applicants are navigating the financial uncertainty
Bricelyn Harrelson didn’t plan to spend six months applying to college.
Bricelyn Harrelson didn’t plan to spend six months applying to college.
The New Smyrna Beach, Florida, high school senior sent in seven applications starting last September and expected to know by now where she’d be enrolling this fall. Instead, she blasted out six fresh applications in the last two months — all to cheaper state universities.
Harrelson, 18, is one of millions of current and prospective college students whose application process has been derailed by the Free Application for Federal Student Aid’s botched overhaul this year. A series of glitches and formula errors — from its December launch to as recently as a week ago — has turned what was supposed to be a more streamlined process into a bureaucratic purgatory for applicants and admissions officers alike.
Kerri Harrelson, left, with her daughter, Bricelyn, who doesn’t yet know where she’ll be attending college in the fall.Courtesy of the Harrelson family“I feel bad for the kids,” said Kerri Harrelson, Bricelyn’s mother. She said her daughter has heard back from all but two of her six latest schools, but that one of the ongoing FAFSA snags has held up potential need-based aid offers. “They started in high school with Covid, and now they’re going to start their college year with all this mess.”
FAFSA is a chokepoint for other forms of aid. Without knowing how much a student may get from the federal government, many schools and scholarship programs can’t put together offers of their own. Federal authorities say they’ll take a key step toward moving the process forward in mid-April.
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