Auditor sheds light on FAFSA fiasco, from birthday mistake to call center failures

There’s no doubt that 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-moving boom. mistakes And miscommunication By the US Department of Education.

On Tuesday, the public got a detailed map of the disaster, thanks to testimony from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) and a court of law. House subcommittee.

These GAO reviews and testimonies come as the department prepares to launch the next FAFSA cycle. will be delayed againIt will be put into service with a soft launch in October and a full launch in December.

Some problems outlined by GAO will sound familiar; NPR has covered them extensively Here And HereBut by examining federal data and interviewing department employees, GAO researchers provide the most comprehensive picture yet of the department’s failures and their impact on applicants.

1. There wasn’t just one problem – there were dozens of problems

In December 2020, Congress FAFSAThe changes were made 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, according to the GAO review, was that the FAFSA underwent a ground-up, cutting-edge overhaul that appeared to be lagging behind almost from the start.

Despite receiving an extension from Congress, the Education Department rushed to release an incomplete FAFSA on Dec. 30, 2023. The form wouldn’t be available continuously for another week, on Jan. 7, but even then it was fraught with problems.

After the FAFSA was finally launched, the department found 55 technical “flaws,” some of which had not yet been resolved as of early September, according to the GAO review. That’s “approximately twice” as many flaws as the FSA flagged during testing.

Part of the problem, the GAO says, is that early testing was rushed and department officials approved testing reviews “even though important studies had not yet been completed.”

As a result, this led to a series of errors, from minor to critical, that were not addressed or caught until students encountered them directly. These errors include:

• All applicants born in 2000 were initially and mysteriously prevented from filling out the form, a problem that took 69 days to resolve. According to the GAO, these 2000 applicants were not warned about the problem or notified when it would be fixed. Many simply kept trying to submit their applications and were unsuccessful.
• Some applicants received erroneous messages that their FAFSA applications would be due in 40-45 days. This was not corrected until 135 days after launch.
• Some graduate students are still told they qualify for federal Pell Grants, a program created by Congress specifically to help low-income earners. licence Students.
• The GAO says that sometimes students’ and parents’ signatures are lost after the form is saved and reopened, a glitch that the department has not fixed.

One of the most obvious problems highlighted by the GAO (and NPR covered it) hit students who had a parent or spouse without a Social Security number. The form’s electronic identity verification process didn’t work well for these mixed-status families. The GAO estimates that while 15% to 40% of mixed-status families were able to have their identities automatically verified, tens of thousands more had to email documents to the department for more laborious, manual verification.

According to the GAO, “(The Department of Education) planned to manually verify only 3,500 individuals, less than 2 percent of the approximately 219,000 parents and spouses who went through the manual verification process.”

Section A report was published on MondayIt reviews efforts to learn from and move past the FAFSA disaster. In this report, the department reassured mixed-status families that identity verification would not be a hurdle in the next FAFSA cycle, but the problem has not been completely resolved.

2. Addicted students really struggled

One of Congress’ goals for the FAFSA overhaul was to make it easier and faster to complete. That’s a no-brainer for independent students. But the GAO’s review makes it clear that the form is still a pain dependant Students who need support from their parents to complete.

• An independent, first-time applicant filled out the new FAFSA in about 15 minutes.
• However, the average completion time for dependent, first-time applicants 5 days.

3. When the students called for help, no one answered the phone.

The Department of Education has a call center system designed to answer questions from students and families, including about the FAFSA.

But according to the GAO review, “approximately three-quarters of all calls to the call center (4.0 million out of 5.4 million) went unanswered in the first 5 months of implementation.”

Why was the episode so unprepared?

Some, including department insiders, They blamed Congress for not providing more funding to help with such a monumental task. Republicans a little patience with that argument.

The GAO review suggests the department bears significant blame for understaffing at its call center: It says it greatly underestimated the number of people seeking help during the implementation period.

Keeping in mind that people were looking for help with many other issues, including help navigating the student loan mess, the department projected that it would receive a total of 2.2 million phone calls in the first 5 months of the FAFSA. They got more than double that number.

The department created the call center based on a naive demand projection.

In the first month of the new FAFSA rollout, the department employed 902 call center employees, according to the GAO. That number is far fewer than the 1,649 people assigned to answer questions in the first month of the previous year’s FAFSA cycle.

As a result, the researchers found, “Call center inability to keep up with demand has become a significant bottleneck for students and families struggling to get help with urgent issues that delay or completely prevent them from successfully accessing and completing the FAFSA.”

The report released Monday notes that the department has added more than 700 new call center representatives when it comes to the next FAFSA cycle.

4. The Education Department did not communicate with students

Not only have calls for help gone unanswered, researchers say it has taken the department nearly two months to directly contact students since the FAFSA was launched.

The 3.5 million applicants in the initial distribution of the form did not hear back from the department until February 20, 2024, more than seven weeks after the form was released, and were simply told that their forms had not yet been processed.

What’s more, after the Education Department delayed adjusting its math to account for inflation, it failed to notify applicants about changes to their eligibility for aid. A problem he has known about for months and has been putting off fixing.

Another 500,000 applicants who qualified for assistance also received no notification or update, according to the GAO.

In this communication gap, some students “may have relied on the inaccurate estimate of financial aid eligibility they received when they submitted their FAFSA to decide which college they could attend,” the GAO researchers write.

In its recent FAFSA report, the department pledged to be 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 processing. The department will provide more specific information about the action required (e.g., missing signature) by the end of the month.”

5. Colleges were also left in a difficult situation

Students weren’t the only ones left in the dark.

College financial aid offices rely on the department to send in FAFSA records so students can be considered for financial aid offers. But the department missed the January deadline to start turning those records in with little warning, then promised to have them in by mid-March.

Another challenge for schools was that students were unable to submit what were called “bulk corrections” to their FAFSA records to the department.

It’s not uncommon for schools to flag minor changes that need to be made to students’ records, and in the past, they could save time by automatically sending these corrections back to the department in batches. However, this time, this batch correction functionality wasn’t working.

Because they couldn’t send corrections in batches, university aid offices had to manually send each record, a much more labor-intensive process. Some schools simply waited, hoping the option to send in batches would return. When it didn’t, those schools had to scramble to find additional people to manually send corrections — and with delays.

The GAO says these delays could mean some enrolled students may not yet receive the aid they are entitled to this semester because of the long time it takes to send registration corrections.

6. FAFSA applications are down

According to the review, these issues “resulted in a decline of approximately 9 percent among high school seniors and other first-time applicants who submitted FAFSAs, with the largest decline among low-income students, based on data from the Department of Education through August 25, 2024.”

In short, the students this remediation was intended to help the most were the ones most affected by its failures.

If there is any good news in this report, it is that the damage would have been much worse if the Department of Education had not launched an information campaign following the problematic practice.

According to the GAO, this campaign helped close “the FAFSA filing gap from approximately 1.4 million fewer applications in mid-May 2024 compared to last year to approximately 430,000 fewer applications in late August 2024.”

7. And somehow, the next FAFSA cycle arrived

The Education Department reassured students and families Monday, ahead of Tuesday’s GAO announcement and congressional hearing, that it was working hard to ensure the upcoming FAFSA wouldn’t repeat last year’s disaster.

“We have pulled out all stops at the Department to ensure that we release the 2025-26 FAFSA in a manner that reflects industry-standard best practices in technology transformation and responds to the candid feedback and suggestions of our partners,” U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona wrote in a recent letter to these partners. “I am proud of the progress we have made over the past several months.”

The department Monday report summarizes progress, includes changes not only to the FAFSA but also to the agency that administers it, the FSA. The department also committed to a much more robust testing plan that should flag many errors before the form goes live.

To allow enough time for pre-testing, the department says it will not yet return the form to its previous October release date and will instead expect to open the form broadly “on or before Dec. 1.”

Until then, millions of students, families, school counselors, and college aid administrators will have to wait and hope that the FAFSA’s never-so-easy, faster-and-easier year was just a glitch, an anomaly, and that one day, in retrospect, the problems will feel as strange and quaint as a paper form.

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