Brace yourself. Once again, it is the season for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
If you had clients who grappled with the 2024-2025 FAFSA, which is the federal financial aid application that millions of households complete annually, you would know what an utter debacle it was.
Among the problems plaguing the FAFSA last cycle was:
- More than a two-month delay in launching the FAFSA.
- Woefully inadequate customer call centers to field the millions of calls from frustrated applicants.
- Dozens of software glitches that made it extremely difficult for many parents to complete the application.
- An ultimate reduction in the number of first-time FAFSA applicant completers who were too intimidated to try tackling the application or gave up trying.
- A chaotic disruption of the admission process for the nation’s colleges and universities.
While officials with the U.S. Department of Education are trying to assure families, colleges and Capitol Hill that things will be different for the 2025-2026 year, understandable skepticism remains.
The first sign that something was amiss came in August when the DOE announced that the FAFSA rollout would be delayed for the second year in a row.
Traditionally, the FAFSA release date is Oct. 1, which is especially helpful for students who will be applying early decision or early action for schools. Schools want to be able to process these students aid applications before they assemble aid packages.
Last year, the FAFSA wasn’t released until the end of December after saying it would be available sometime that month. Yet even when it was released, only a tiny fraction of families could successfully access it and completion numbers were dramatically down for months after that.
This time around, the roll-out date is scheduled for Dec. 1. We will see if that date holds true.
One reason for hope this year is that the DOE has added significantly more people to the FAFSA call center. Recent GAO findings on the FAFSA debacle showed that 74% of the 5.4 million calls placed to the FAFSA call center were not answered last season. Inexplicably, the GAO auditors noted the number of people manning the FAFSA phones was actually lower than the previous year, even though the FAFSA had undergone a dramatic number of changes.
If your clients encounter trouble with the latest FAFSA, the Federal Student Aid help number is (800) 433-3243. If you visit the FSA site, you can also seek help via a live chat.
The GAO audit also found that more than 40 technical issues hobbled the initial rollout of the FAFSA form. These included problems that blocked some students from completing the application—or, in some cases, prevented them from starting it. Other issues include deleting information applicants entered into the form, providing erroneous error messages and providing incorrect estimates of students’ eligibility for federal aid.
Another area of focus was on the leadership within the student aid bureaucracy. The department experienced a great deal of turnover, including in the student aid office’s position of chief information officer. Since 2021, the position has changed five times, and the role still doesn’t have a permanent person.
Last year’s issues caused some students’ Student Aid Index, which is generated by information families provide on the FAFSA, as well automatically via the Internal Revenue Service, to spit out wrong results. This caused some families to wrongly assume that they would be eligible for more financial aid, while others were led to believe the opposite.
If you aren’t familiar with the term, the Student Aid Index (SAI) has replaced the Expected Family Contribution (EFC). SAI and its EFC predecessor represent what the financial aid formula has determined a household should be able to pay, at minimum, for one year of college.
One way to double-check an SAI generated by the FAFSA is to use the Federal Student Aid Estimator before the FAFSA is available. This calculator estimates a student’s federal aid and generates a preliminary SAI.
If the SAIs generated by the FAFSA and the estimator differ by more than a minor amount, it’s worth investigating. The FAFSA software might have produced the wrong SAI. Alternatively, your client could have caused that discrepancy by inputting the wrong figures with either method.
At a congressional hearing in September, U.S. House of Representatives members on both sides of the aisle, as well as GAO officials who testified, expressed skepticism about the problems being fixed for the new FAFSA season.
What’s ironic about what has transpired during the past year is that a key aim of Congress when it passed legislation to simplify the FAFSA was to encourage more students to apply for aid. However, as the GAO noted, “Rather than simplifying access to student financial aid—one of the department's strategic goals—the FAFSA rollout created roadblocks for some students and their families.”
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