Troubled rollout of FAFSA overhaul causes major delays for students seeking financial aid

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• William Brangham:

  Students waiting on financial aid will now have to wait even longer after the Department of Education just found a calculation error on hundreds of thousands of student aid applications.

  That means that, right as students are trying to decide what school to attend, some have to make that choice not knowing key information about how much aid they're getting.

  Laura Barron-Lopez is here to help us unravel all the details.

• Laura Barron-Lopez:

  That's right, William.

  The calculation error in the free application for federal student aid, commonly known as FAFSA, impacts as many as 200,000 applicants. The latest misstep comes after the Education Department already delayed the launch of its new FAFSA form by three months, requiring some colleges to adjust enrollment deadlines.

  Now many students are questioning if they will get any aid at all. Here's what some high school seniors told us earlier this month.

• Dominic Pasella, Student:

  It's just been delay after delay. The only thing FAFSA has said is that it's coming in mid-March. It's coming then. It's mid-March right now, and we have heard absolutely nothing.

• Heron Williams, Student:

  I don't know where I'm going to go because I don't have the money to just decide to go to whatever school. I'm in a spot where I don't know how much it's going to cost for me to go to college. So, because of the delays and the delays in them sending their financial aid offers, I'm put in a spot where I have no idea what I'm going to be able to do.

• Cesar Maya, Student:

  I worry because most of my grants and most of my scholarships have a time frame from now until March 31, which is in 10 days.

  If FAFSA form does not come to me in between those 10 days, most of my scholarships will be invalid and my scholarships will not apply to my courses.

• Javis Williams, Student:

  As a senior who's trying to get college stuff squared away, it's really frustrating and honestly very anxiety-inducing, because I don't know how much money I'm going to get. And I can run numbers through calculators all I want, but it really depends on when I get that letter from the colleges.

• Julianna Izzard, Student:

  It's beginning to get to that time where people are choosing their colleges, they're finalizing plans, and they're beginning their next steps of buying things for their college dorms, getting summer jobs because they know where they're going to be.

  And I feel behind because I don't know where I'm going to go yet because I can't commit. So it's causing anxiety, and that kind of bleeds into my life in every aspect.

• Dominic Pasella:

  I think not knowing is just pushing back plans. I don't know how much I should be saving, how much my parents should be saving. They don't really know what to do either because not a lot of information has been relayed.

• Javis Williams:

  And seeing that a lot of my money for college would be coming from federal grants and stuff, I won't get that number until the FAFSA is received, until colleges start sending out their decision. So we're basically sitting ducks right now.

• Laura Barron-Lopez:

  For more on how this will impact students and their families, I'm joined by Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education and a former U.S. Undersecretary of Education.

  Ted, thanks so much for joining us.

  Federal financial aid is critical to helping students pay for college tuition. So how is this latest mishap going to impact students? And is it going to mean that they can't go to their top school of choice?

  Ted Mitchell, Former U.S. Undersecretary of Education: Yes, thanks. Thanks, Laura. Thanks for having me.

  This is a rolling catastrophe. And as we have just heard, it's rolling over students who are waiting to hear about their aid, so that they can make the right decision for them and their families. This is unprecedented. The — as your reporting said at the beginning, the delay has been a long time coming, three, four months now.

  Federal student aid forms have begun getting out to colleges. That's the good news. The bad news, as you report, is that some of them still need to be corrected. It'll be several weeks now before colleges get their full contingent of aid forms, a week after that or so before colleges can package aid.

  This is crunch time for students. And I have great, great, great sympathy for them. I have great sympathy for financial aid officers at colleges and universities too, who want to provide that sure notion of how much money students are going to get, but their hands are tied behind their backs because they're just not getting the information they need from the federal government.

• Laura Barron-Lopez:

  Well, since students may not know how much financial aid they even have when they're making this decision, are colleges and universities reacting in any way to that? Are they extending the decision deadline or deadlines for deposits?

• Ted Mitchell:

  Yes, that's a really good question. We have been working at the American Council on Education to encourage all colleges and universities to extend that May 1 deadline.

  It's not a formal deadline, but it's certainly one that most institutions abide by. Figure it out. If a student gets the packages on April 15, they have two weeks to decide where to go? That's not fair. It's particularly not fair to low-income first-generation students, for whom this is a decision of monumental proportions for them, for their families, and for their communities.

  So we have 175 institutions that have moved their deadline either to the middle of May or to June, and they're giant institutions, about five million students represented, in the University of California, California State university system, the SUNY system, the University of North Carolina system.

  We need more institutions to move those deadlines. It's the right thing to do.

• Laura Barron-Lopez:

  According to federal data analyzed by the National College Attainment Network, a nonprofit that helps students prepare for college, the number of high school seniors filling out the FAFSA application form was down by more than 30 percent compared to last academic year.

  These changes that have been made to FAFSA most recently were designed to make it so more students had access, increase applications. How could this impact those low-income students that you're talking about or students of color?

• Ted Mitchell:

  Well, this is really the sad irony is that the changes to FAFSA will impact low-income students positively; 600,000 more students will be eligible for the Pell Grant once this gets all worked out, but that doesn't help the students who are looking at college today.

  The darkest nightmare is that this will prevent students from going to college in the first place. That 30 percent lower FAFSA, that's 30 percent of American high school students who are likely to not matriculate this fall, and that's a danger not only to them, but to the country.

• Laura Barron-Lopez:

  That's stunning that it may mean some students may not be able to go to college at all, but these sweeping changes to federal financial aid are a result of a 2020 bill passed by Congress.

  It was meant, as we said, to make the application easier, to extend eligibility. But Republicans are blaming President Biden's administration. The administration is blaming Congress for what has gone wrong so far this year. How did this happen? What can be done to prevent it in the future?

• Ted Mitchell:

  Yes, I think that there will be time to do an analysis once we have gotten this figured out, and that's the most important thing, is to make it possible for students to access financial aid now, so that they can begin their studies in the summer or in the fall.

  But there's plenty of blame to go around. This is a problem of long standing. The computer systems that run financial aid have been out of date for some time now. The simplification process is simple for the students, we hope, but not so simple in building the technology.

  There are a lot of things that backed up around this from the department, from Congress, and from vendors who are supplying the software to both the government and to institutions. We will unravel this, but I think the bottom line is, this is a very important task for the federal government. We need to get it right for our students and for our collective future.

• Laura Barron-Lopez:

  Well, we certainly hope it's fixed soon.

  That's Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education.

  Thank you for your time.

• Laura Barron-Lopez:

  Thanks a lot.