A batch of federal financial aid applications were just days away from being processed when Department of Education officials made a fateful discovery: 70,000 emails from students across the country, containing reams of key data.
They were sitting in an inbox, untouched.
That discovery last week set off a frantic, three-day scrambled effort by more than 200 department officials, including Richard Cordray, the nation’s top student aid official, to read each of the emails one by one and extract critical identifying information. required for financial aid. The students’ future depended on it.
“He needs to untangle it,” Mr. Cordray told his staff members on Thursday, according to tapes of two back-to-back meetings obtained by The New York Times. “Well, you know, I’m getting pretty impatient.”
An exasperated member of staff responded: “We worked all night – literally – all night.”
It was another setback in the bad mood of a new version of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as FAFSA, which millions of families and thousands of schools rely on to determine how students will pay for college. Three years ago, Congress ordered the Department of Education to revamp the new form to make it easier and more accessible. It was anything but.
For nearly six months, students and schools navigated a bureaucratic mess caused by severe delays in launching the website and processing critical information. A series of department blunders – from a haphazard installation to technical breakdowns – have left students and schools stranded and thrown the most critical stage of the college admissions season into disarray.
“Hanging by their nails”
In a normal year, students will have their financial aid offers sorted by now, giving them plenty of time to prepare for the traditional decision day on May 1, when many schools expect commitments.
But this is no ordinary year.
Due to delays in the development of the FAFSA, schools do not have the information they need from the government to gather financial aid offers. Students have been forced to put off decisions about where to attend college because they have no idea how much aid they will receive.
Many schools are pushing back their application deadlines to give students more time to figure out their finances, throwing college budgets and waiting lists into chaos.
The Ministry of Education has promised to meet a self-imposed deadline of Friday to send student financial information to schools.
But the task before us is monumental. The department is working with 5 million applications submitted so far, but more than 10 million more are expected to come in as students move through the process, which is still not running without delays.
“Financial aid offices across the country are hanging on by their fingernails at this point,” said Justin Draeger, executive director of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.
A broken system
The goal of the revamped FAFSA system was to simplify the notoriously confusing form by reducing it from more than 100 questions to fewer than 40 and making it more accessible to lower-income students.
But it wasn’t ready for release in October, when the FAFSA form is usually available for students to submit their families’ financial information to the government.
In late December, when the system finally launched, problems were immediately apparent.
Technical glitches prevented many students from accessing the form on the website. Students reported being repeatedly kicked out or locked out of the form or locked out after waiting 30 minutes to three hours for someone to answer the department’s helpline.
The wrong disposition has subverted a critical function of the federal student aid process.
The government needs FAFSA information to calculate how much federal aid students should receive. Schools, in turn, need this number to make their own calculations about how much a student should expect to pay at that particular college or university after factoring in tuition and any additional scholarships.
For many students, the FAFSA estimate, sometimes received before they even hear back from any of the schools they applied to, is the first sign of hope that college is possible.
Students in a vacuum
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 heart set on Duke University.
But first, she needs 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’s deeper than a form. It is our future.”
Her case ran afoul of 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, which wasn’t a problem with the old form.
To approve students with missing Social Security data, the Department of Education asked applicants like Andrea to email photos of their driver’s license, ID or other documents that would verify their identity. As the department prepared to announce last week that the Social Security number issue had been resolved, officials realized that its inbox and 70,000 emails had remained untouched.
That prompted Mr. Cordray to assemble teams of emergency volunteers to work overtime to overcome the backlog.
The students, he said, relied on them.
“These are many of the Dreamers, the new immigrants and the kind of people who, if they can just get a hand in the higher education process, can make their way in this country,” Mr. Cordray said. “We want them to be able to do that.”
Although the previous FAFSA form was long and complicated, seniors at Andrea’s school were able to fill out their forms without much incident in previous years. KIPP Colorado, part of a network of public charter schools with some of the highest college acceptance rates for low-income students in the country, hosts an annual FAFSA night, when families gather to fill out the form together.
This year, only about 20 percent of students at FAFSA night were able to fill out the form — a huge change from previous years, school officials said.
Karen Chavez, assistant director of college and careers for KIPP Colorado, said she usually tries to reassure students that college is accessible.
But he’s struggling with that message this year.
“It’s hard for us as counselors to have to be careful about what we say or how we say things,” he said, “because I want to protect their hearts and manage their expectations.”
Who is to blame?
The Government Accountability Office launched an investigation into the development of the FAFSA at the request of Republicans, who say it took a backseat to other priorities, such as President Biden’s student loan forgiveness programs.
Several senior officials in the White House and the Department of Education cited unreasonably short timelines, contractors who missed deadlines and insufficient funding. Speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the problems openly, the officials acknowledged that other important assignments, such as restarting federal loan repayments and reopening schools after the coronavirus pandemic, were draining vital resources.
“It’s not like nobody here realized how important this project is or how big this project is,” said James Kvaal, an undersecretary at the Department of Education. “And it was a top priority for us at the highest levels of the division a year and a half ago.”
There were obvious failings, such as the lack of robust user testing required to identify what would turn out to be dozens of major technical problems. And the Department of Education only realized in November that it had not adjusted a critical income formula, which would have denied more than $1 billion in student aid.
Although the department tried to express optimism about its progress, officials privately harbored doubts.
On Feb. 13, Miguel A. Cardona, the education secretary, told reporters that once the technical issues are resolved, the FAFSA would be a “15-minute process” and a “clear win” for students and schools.
A week later, at a staff meeting, Mr. Cordray had a different take: “It’s too bad,” he said, according to people who heard the comments. “It could get worse.”
In response to a request for comment for this article, Mr. Cordray said the Department of Education’s focus was on providing an updated and improved FAFSA.
“Our team is not focused on pointing fingers,” he said, “but on getting more federal student aid to deserving students and families.”
The bets
There are growing concerns that FAFSA problems will disproportionately affect traditionally underserved communities, particularly Black, Latino, first-generation, and low-income students.
For many of them, the biggest factor in deciding on a college is how to pay for it.
Student advocates fear that many of them will simply drop out, skipping college or relying on expensive loans to pay for it.
“The equity stakes are monumental,” said Kim Cook, executive director of the National College Attainment Network. “The later these letters come, the more the conversation shifts from where it should go if it should go.”
This month, the Department of Education began deploying staff around the country to provide a so-called concierge service, backed by $50 million from the department’s budget, to provide technical support to colleges facing backlogs.
But as of last week, officials had met in person with only 20 of the 180 schools that had requested extra support, according to a senior department official.
Lodriguez Murray, senior vice president of public policy and government affairs at the United Negro College Fund, said the fallout from FAFSA delays could be comparable to the devastation experienced by historically black colleges and universities in 2011, when the government made it more difficult for parents to get loans to pay for their children’s education. Enrollment at HBCUs plummeted by 40,000 within a year when the flow of aid was cut off.
“This is a crisis that seems unnecessary,” Mr. Murray said of the FAFSA fallout, “and one that we hope can still be avoided.”
