Updated September 25, 2024 at 11:50 AM ET
There’s no question, the rollout of the revamped FAFSA – the Free Application for Federal Student Aid that millions of students must fill out to qualify for college loans and grants – was a slow-motion explosion of mistakes and miscommunication by the U.S. Department of Education.
On Tuesday, though, the public got a detailed map of that disaster, thanks to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) and testimony before a House subcommittee.
GAO investigators described a rollout so plagued by problems that many students had to choose and commit to a college without knowing if they could afford it.
“Can you imagine?” Melissa Emery-Arras, a GAO director, told lawmakers. “It's like buying a house but not knowing how much aid you're going to get. And having to make a commitment right then and there.”
These GAO reviews and testimony come as the department prepares to launch the next FAFSA cycle, which will again be delayed, with a small rollout in October and a full launch by December.
Some of the problems outlined by the GAO will sound familiar; NPR has covered them extensively here and here. But, by reviewing federal data and conducting interviews with department employees, GAO investigators offer the fullest picture yet of the department’s failures and their impact on applicants.
1. There wasn’t just one problem – there were dozens
In December 2020, Congress voted to overhaul the FAFSA. The changes were intended to make the form easier to fill out and expand access to federal student aid for students who need it most. Implementation of this new law would fall to the incoming Biden administration.
The problem was, the FAFSA ended up getting a down-to-the-studs, high-tech overhaul that appears to have fallen behind almost from the start, according to the GAO review.
Even after getting an extension from Congress, the Education Department still rushed to release an incomplete FAFSA on Dec. 30, 2023. The form would not be consistently available for another week, on Jan. 7, though, even then, it was riddled with problems.
According to the GAO review, the department identified 55 technical “defects” after the FAFSA finally launched, some of which have yet to be resolved as of early September. That’s “about twice as many” defects as FSA had flagged during testing.
Part of the problem, according to the GAO, is that early testing was rushed, and department officials signed off on testing reviews “though significant work had not yet been completed.”
Ultimately, this led to an array of mistakes, from minor to critical, that weren’t addressed – or even caught – until students ran headlong into them. Among those mistakes:
- All applicants born in the year 2000 were initially and mysteriously blocked from completing the form, a problem that took 69 days to fix. According to the GAO, these year-2000 applicants weren’t warned of the problem, nor were they told when it was fixed. Many simply kept trying and failing to submit their application.
- Some applicants received erroneous messages that their FAFSA application would expire after 40-45 days. This wasn’t fixed until 135 days after launch.
- Some graduate students are still being told they qualify for federal Pell Grants – a program specifically created by Congress to help low-income undergraduate students.
- The form sometimes disappears students’ and parents’ signatures after it’s been saved and re-opened – a glitch the GAO says the department has not resolved.
One of the most glaring problems the GAO highlights (and NPR has covered) hit students whose parent or spouse does not have a Social Security number. The form’s electronic identity verification process for these mixed-status families didn’t work well. The GAO estimates that between 15 and 40% of mixed-status families were able to have their identities verified automatically, but tens of thousands were instead forced to email documents to the department for a more burdensome, manual verification.
According to the GAO, “[the Department of] Education planned for only 3,500 individuals to be manually verified, less than 2 percent of the approximately 219,000 parents and spouses who actually ended up going through the manual verification process.”
The department issued a report Monday, reviewing its efforts to learn from and move beyond the FAFSA debacle. In that report, the department assured mixed-status families that identity verification would not be a barrier in the next FAFSA cycle, though the problem has not been fully resolved.
2. Dependent students really struggled
One of Congress’ goals for the FAFSA overhaul was to make it easier and faster to complete. For independent students, it was a breeze. But the GAO’s review makes clear, the form was still a slog for dependent students who needed parental input to complete it.
- An independent, first-time applicant completed the new FAFSA in roughly 15 minutes.
- But for dependent, first-time applicants, the median completion time was 5 days.
3. When students called for help, no one answered the phone
The Education Department has a call center system meant to answer students’ and families’ questions, including about the FAFSA.
But according to the GAO review, “nearly three quarters of all calls to the call center (4.0 million out of 5.4 million calls) went unanswered during the first 5 months of the rollout.”
Why was the department so unprepared?
Some, including department insiders, have faulted Congress for not providing more funding to help with such a gargantuan task. Republicans have shown little patience with that argument.
The GAO review suggests the department bears considerable blame for its short-staffed call center: It vastly underestimated how many people would ask for help during the rollout period.
Keeping in mind that people also call for help with lots of other issues, including help navigating student loan confusion, the department projected it would receive a total of 2.2 million phone calls within the first 5 months of the FAFSA rollout. They got more than twice that many.
The department staffed its call center based on what seems like a naive projection of demand.
For the first month of the new FAFSA rollout, the department employed 902 call center workers according to the GAO – far fewer than the 1,649 it made available to answer questions during the first month of the previous year’s FAFSA cycle.
“For panicked parents and students who waited for hours for someone not to pick up their phone call, now you know why,” said Rep. Burgess Owens, R-Utah, who led the hearing.
As a result, investigators found, “The call center’s failure to meet demand became a significant bottleneck for students and families who struggled to get help with pressing issues that delayed or entirely prevented them from successfully accessing and completing the FAFSA.”
Looking ahead to the next FAFSA cycle in its Monday report, the department says it has added more than 700 new call center agents.
4. The Education Department did not communicate with students
Not only did calls for help go unanswered, investigators say the department took nearly two months after the FAFSA’s launch to communicate directly with students.
The 3.5 million applicants who navigated the form’s initial rollout heard nothing from the department until Feb. 20, 2024 – more than seven weeks after the form launched – and that was simply to tell them that their forms had not yet been processed.
What’s more, the Education Department didn’t tell applicants about changes to their aid eligibility after it belatedly adjusted its math to account for inflation – a problem it had known about and delayed fixing for months.
According to the GAO, another 500,000 applicants whose aid eligibility changed as the result of other department mistakes likewise received no notice or update.
In this communication void, GAO investigators write, some students “may have relied on the inaccurate estimate of the financial aid eligibility they received when they submitted their FAFSA to make decisions about which college they could afford.”
In its own recent FAFSA report, the department committed to being more transparent with applicants in the future: “A student is now notified as soon as their application is processed, including whether it was successfully processed or if it requires additional action. By the end of the month, the Department will provide more specific information about the action required (e.g., missing a signature).”
5. Colleges were left in the lurch too
Students weren’t the only ones in the dark.
College financial aid offices depend on the department to send students’ FAFSA records before they can make financial aid offers. But the department missed its January deadline to begin delivering those records, with little warning, then promised to deliver them by mid-March.
Another challenge for schools: They could not submit to the department what are called “batch corrections” to students’ FAFSA records.
It’s not uncommon for schools to flag minor changes that must be made to students’ records and, in the past, they could save time by submitting those corrections back to the department automatically, in batches. But, this time around, this batch corrections function wasn’t working.
Without being able to submit corrections in batches, college aid offices were forced to manually submit each record, a much more labor-intensive process. Some schools simply waited, hoping the option to submit in batches would return. When it didn’t, these schools had to scramble to find additional people to manually – and belatedly – send their record corrections.
Even now, the GAO says, these delays could mean some enrolled students haven’t yet received the aid they’re entitled to this semester because records corrections took so long to submit.
6. FAFSA submissions are down
According to the review, these problems “contributed to about 9 percent fewer high school seniors and other first-time applicants submitting a FAFSA, with the largest declines among lower-income students, according to [Department of] Education data as of August 25, 2024.”
In short, the students this fix was most intended to help were hardest hit by its failures, a fact highlighted by Florida Democrat Frederica Wilson: “I'm most upset that the delays and ongoing setbacks with FAFSA have meant that some of our want-to-be-somebody students have just decided not to go to college at all. They have just given up.”
If there’s any good news in this report, it’s that the damage would have been far worse had the Education Department not mounted an outreach campaign following its troubled rollout.
According to the GAO, that campaign helped close “the FAFSA submission gap from about 1.4 million fewer applicants in mid-May 2024 to around 430,000 fewer applicants in late August 2024 compared to last year.”
7. And somehow, the next FAFSA cycle is upon us
Lawmakers inevitably asked investigators if the Education Department and its FAFSA contractor are prepared for the next FAFSA rollout. The GAO’s Marisol Cruz Cain responded: “From what we've seen, the oversight, the testing issues, if they keep managing it the way they are, I don't have confidence that they'll be able to deliver the functionality.”
For its part, the Education Department went to great lengths on Monday, ahead of Tuesday’s GAO release and congressional hearing, to assure students and families that it has been hard at work making sure this upcoming FAFSA won’t mirror last year’s calamity.
“We have put all hands on deck at the Department to make sure we release the 2025-26 FAFSA in a way that reflects industry-standard best practices around technological transformation and responds to the frank feedback and recommendations of our partners,” U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona wrote in a recent letter to those partners. “I am proud of the progress we have made over the last few months.”
The department’s Monday report outlines that progress, including changes not just to the FAFSA but to the agency that manages it, FSA. The department has also committed to a much more robust testing plan that should flag many errors before the form goes live.
To leave ample time for pre-testing, the department says it won’t yet be returning to the form’s previous, October release date and will instead wait to open the form widely “on or before December 1.”
Until then, millions of students, families, school counselors and college aid administrators are left to wait and hope that the easier, faster FAFSA’s anything-but-easy year was just a blip, an anomaly, and that someday, in hindsight, the troubles will feel as strange and quaint as a paper form.
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