For the second year in a row, student and parent access to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) was delayed nationwide. The U.S. Department of Education announced on Aug. 7 that the form would be available to students two months after the intended Oct. 1 release date, but, it was actually released a few days earlier, on Nov. 24.
FAFSA is a method used to determine a family’s ability to pay for college and calculate their federal aid eligibility. The federal government collects information about the family’s financial status through financial aid forms and income tax returns.
In 2021, the FAFSA Simplification Act aimed to make the form simpler, encouraging more people to fill it out. This act moved the release date of FAFSA up from the previous date of January or February to Oct. 1 of 2023. However, the new formula to calculate student contributions caused delays, failing to meet the Oct. 1, November and December release targets due to necessary changes to the software.
“What happened is they couldn’t get it to work on time,” Director of College Guidance Sue Rexford said. “It wasn’t that it was a bad idea. It’s just that they couldn’t execute it on time.”
Ultimately, Congress mandated that the form be released by the end of Dec. 2023. But, when FAFSA did go up, it had to be shut down the next day for maintenance issues that continued throughout the rest of the school year. This resulted in students and parents experiencing log-in errors and having issues with their data being processed properly.
When students had to commit to colleges in May 2024, many still hadn’t received financial aid packages. Low-income students who rely on federal financial aid were forced to not commit to college and take a year off or attend community college.
“It’s a global issue,” Rexford said. “It has created an unfairness in lower-income students being able to apply to college. I think one of the biggest negatives in all of this, is that it’s [disadvantageous] to people who are already at a disadvantage.”
For Rabbi Fabian Werbin, parent to senior Cati Werbin and Ari Werbin (‘24), the FAFSA process was difficult. After many delays, at the end of Dec. 2023, the family could fill out the FAFSA application, but every time they tried to verify the account they created it said that it was invalid. When they tried to create a new account, the system told them that the account already existed.
“I was very scared that I wouldn’t get financial aid at all,” Ari said. “Also, this is the first time that any one of my family’s ever gone to college [in the United States], so we have no we had no idea what the FAFSA even was. So the fact that we were having so many difficulties with this, we were just panicking for months.”
After four months of being unable to log into his account, Ari decided to call the FAFSA information center. According to Ari, he called numerous times and spent hours on the phone, but each time they said that a lot of people were experiencing this issue and there was nothing they could do about it. Finally, a representative was able to help fix the issue by deleting his existing account so that he could make a new one.
“For us, it was a very long and, I would say, challenging experience,” Fabian said. “I hope this year is going to be better.”
According to Rexford, this impact was also felt by financial aid workers at colleges. They could not do their jobs because they did not have the proper information from FAFSA to send financial aid packages. When they did receive the information, staff faced long hours trying to get packages out to students, according to an article from Higher Ed Dive.
This year, FAFSA has been running better, and families like the Werbins hope that this will continue. Similarly, Rexford is optimistic that last year’s challenges will remain behind them.
“My hope this year is that people forget what happened last year, because it was such a disaster, and that everything will run smoothly,” Rexford said. “The colleges will be able to process financial aid offers as quickly as possible, so that students will have all the facts and information they need to make informed decisions.”
