Colleges won't receive FAFSA data until March, delaying aid offers
It could be a few more months before millions of students and families know how much they will have to pay for college this fall.
The troubled rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form — and the overhaul of the formula for determining who gets federal financial aid — was exacerbated Tuesday when the Department of Education announced it would not report data to schools until beginning of March. The numbers would come in the next day.
Many schools rely on the FAFSA to help them determine how much of their institutional money to spend in the form of grants that students do not have to pay back. So until they have the information, any attempt to quote current or recently admitted students can only be a rough estimate.
This delay is especially problematic for low-income students, for whom a difference of a few thousand dollars can determine whether they attend school at all or complete a program they have already started.
One reason for the delay is that the Ministry of Education did late in updating some of his calculations for inflation. Completing that work means 1.3 million people will receive larger Pell Grants — the money the federal government makes available to lower-income students — than they otherwise would have received.
The delay, however, is disrupting the work of harried school financial aid officials, who are trying to handle the biggest changes to the system in decades without shutting it down during the restart.
Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, a group that represents first responders, said in a statement that the “continued delays — communicated at the last minute — threaten to harm the very students and families receiving federal student aid . meant to help.”
The actual damage will depend on how nimble its members are once they get the data from the government — and on the patience of families trying to make huge financial decisions without a clear sense of the price. “Because of the delay, current and newly admitted students will not know their estimated financial aid offer until very late in the spring semester,” Keith Williams, executive director of Michigan State University's financial aid office, said in an email.
A major concern is that some low-income or first-generation students will simply throw up their hands and not bother to fill out their applications.
“It is not an exaggeration to say that these types of delays directly impact the way students make decisions,” said Jon Fansmith, senior vice president of government relations for the American Council on Education, a university trade group.
According to the department, more than 3.1 million people have already completed the FAFSA. However, one group that does not have this includes students who have a parent who does not have a citizen service number. It's not clear why those students still can't complete the process a month after the new FAFSA form became available.
The Department of Education has faced some unusual challenges over the past year, on top of the FAFSA overhaul. Last year it had to restart the machinery to collect student loan payments after a multi-year payment pause due to the pandemic, and it has change the way it oversees the administrators who collect these payments. The department had asked Congress for this more money to help it complete all the work, but it received no additional money for the tasks.
Ann Carrns reporting contributed.