A look at the blunders that threw the college admissions season into disarray
There were only days left to process a batch of applications for federal financial aid when Department of Education officials made a fateful discovery: 70,000 emails from students across the country, containing large amounts of vital data.
They sat untouched in an inbox.
That discovery last week set off a panicked, three-day scramble by more than 200 department employees, including Richard Cordray, the nation’s top student aid official, to read through each of the emails one by one and to extract crucial identifying information needed for the investigation. financial help. The future of the students depended on it.
“It needs to unravel,” Mr. Cordray told his staffers on Thursday, according to recordings of two consecutive meetings obtained by The New York Times. “So, you know, I’m getting pretty impatient.”
An exasperated employee replied, “We worked all night – literally – all night.”
It was another setback in the botched rollout of a new version of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as FAFSA, that millions of families and thousands of schools rely on to determine how students will pay for college. Three years ago, Congress directed the Department of Education to revamp the new form to make it simpler and more accessible. It has been anything but.
For nearly six months, students and schools had to navigate a bureaucratic mess caused by serious delays in launching the website and processing crucial information. A series of department blunders — from a haphazard rollout to technical glitches — have left students and schools in limbo and thrown into disarray the most critical phase of the college admissions season.
‘Hanging on by their fingernails’
In a normal year, students would be sorting through their financial aid offers by now, giving them plenty of time to prepare for the traditional May 1 decision day, when many schools expect commitments.
But this is not a normal year.
Due to the delays in the FAFSA rollout, schools do not have the information they need from the government to put together financial aid offers. Students have had to postpone decisions about where to go to college because they have no idea how much help they will receive.
Many schools are shifting their enrollment deadlines to give students more time to get their finances in order, throwing college budgets and waiting lists into chaos.
The Ministry of Education has pledged to meet Friday’s self-imposed deadline to send students’ financial information to schools. A Biden administration official, who requested anonymity to discuss details of the process, said the department had begun sending out “small batches” of data this weekend.
But the task ahead is monumental. The department is working with 5.7 million applications to date, but it is expected that more than 10 million additional applications will be received as students work their way through the process. still not functioning without delays.
“Financial aid offices across the country are hanging on by their fingernails right now,” said Justin Draeger, the CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.
A broken system
The goal of the updated FAFSA system was to simplify the notoriously baffling form by reducing it from more than 100 questions under 40 years of age and more accessible to lower-income students.
But it wasn’t ready to roll out in October, when the FAFSA form usually becomes available for students to provide their family’s financial information to the government.
At the end of December, when the system was finally launched, the problems were immediately apparent.
Due to technical glitches, many students were unable to access the form on the website. Students reported being repeatedly kicked out or locked out, or hanging up after waiting 30 minutes to three hours for someone to answer the department’s helpline.
The botched rollout has upended a crucial function of the federal student aid process.
The government needs the FAFSA information to calculate how much federal aid students should receive. The schools, in turn, need that number to make their own calculations about how much a student should expect to pay at that specific college or university, after adding up tuition and any additional scholarships.
For many students, the FAFSA estimate, sometimes received before they even hear from one of the schools they applied to, is the first sign of hope that college is within reach.
Students in limbo
Andrea, a senior at KIPP Denver Collegiate High School in Colorado, will be the first person in her family to attend college. She has her sights set on Duke University.
But first she has to navigate the FAFSA.
“It’s painful,” said Andrea, 17, who asked to be identified by her first name to protect her parents, who immigrated to the United States from Mexico and are undocumented. “It goes deeper than a form. It is our future.”
Her case encountered perhaps the most pernicious flaw in the rollout: The new form froze applicants who couldn’t provide a Social Security number for themselves or their parent or guardian, something that wasn’t a problem with the old form.
To get students with missing social security information approved, the Ministry of Education asked applicants like Andrea to submit photos of a driver’s license, ID card or other documents that would verify their identity by email. As the department prepared to announce last week that the Social Security number issue had been resolved, officials realized the inbox and its 70,000 emails had gone untouched.
That prompted Mr. Cordray to put together emergency teams of volunteers who had to work overtime to clear the backlog.
The students, he said, trusted it.
“These are a lot of Dreamers, new immigrants and the kind of people who, if they can just lend a hand in the higher education process, can find their way to this country,” Mr. Cordray said. “We want them to be able to do that.”
Although the previous FAFSA form was long and complex, seniors at Andrea’s school were able to complete their forms without many incidents in recent years. KIPP Colorado, part of a network of public charter schools with some of the highest acceptance rates for low-income students in the country, hosts an annual FAFSA night, where families gather to fill out the form together.
This year, only about 20 percent of students at FAFSA night were able to complete the form — a huge change from previous years, school officials said.
Karen Chavez, assistant director of college and careers at KIPP Colorado, said she usually tried to reassure students that college was within reach.
But she is having difficulty with that message this year.
“It’s hard for us as counselors to have to pay attention to what I say or how I say things,” she said, “because I want to guard their hearts and manage their expectations.”
Who is to blame?
The Government Accountability Office has started one research in the rollout of the FAFSA at the request of Republicans, who say it took a back seat to other priorities, such as President Biden’s student debt forgiveness programs.
Several senior White House and Department of Education officials have cited unreasonably short timelines, contractors who missed deadlines and insufficient funding. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the issues openly, acknowledged that other key orders, such as restarting federal loan repayments and reopening schools after the coronavirus pandemic, were draining vital resources.
“It’s not like anyone here didn’t realize how important this project is or how big this project is,” said James Kvaal, deputy secretary of the Department of Education. “And it has been a top priority for us at the very highest levels of the department for a year and a half.”
There were obvious misses, such as a lack of robust user testing needed to catch dozens of major technical issues. And the Department of Education only realized in November that it had failed to adjust the critical income formula, which would have denied more than $1 billion in aid to students.
Even as the department tried to express optimism about progress, officials privately harbored doubts.
On February 13, Miguel A. Cardona, the education secretary, told reporters that once the technical issues were resolved, FAFSA would be a “15-minute process” and a “net win” for students and schools.
A week later, at a staff meeting, Mr. Cordray had a different assessment: “It’s really bad,” he said, according to people who heard the comments. “It could get worse.”
In response to a request for comment on this article, Mr. Cordray said the Department of Education’s focus was on providing an updated and streamlined FAFSA.
“Our team is not focused on pointing fingers,” he said, “but on getting more federal student aid to deserving students and families.”
Commitment
There is growing concern that FAFSA issues will disproportionately impact traditionally underserved communities, particularly Black, Latino, first-generation, and low-income students.
For many of them, the most important factor in choosing a university is how to pay for it.
Student advocates fear that many of them will simply give up, skip college or rely on expensive loans to pay for college.
“The equity stakes are enormous,” said Kim Cook, CEO of the National College Attainment Network. “The later those letters come, the more the conversation shifts from where to go or where to go.”
This month, the Ministry of Education began deploying personnel across the country to conduct a so-called… concierge service, supported with $50 million from the department’s budget to provide technical support to colleges struggling with the delays.
But as of last week, officials had met in person with only 20 of the 180 schools that had requested additional support, a senior department official said.
Lodriguez Murray, the senior vice president for public policy and government affairs at the United Negro College Fund, said the impact of the FAFSA delays could be similar to the devastation historically black colleges and universities experienced in 2011, when the government made it more difficult. for parents to obtain loans to help pay for their children’s education. Enrollment at HBCUs dropped by 40,000 in one year when aid flow was cut off.
“It is a crisis that seems unnecessary,” Mr. Murray said of the fallout from the FAFSA, “and one that we hope can still be averted.”