330,000 FAFSAs must be reprocessed, Education Department says

Higher Ed Dive

Laura Spitalniak

April 2, 2024

Dive Brief:

• About 330,000 federal financial aid applications will need to be reprocessed following yet another data error, according to the U.S. Department of Education. This development continues a trend of glitches and technical difficulties in a tumultuous cycle with the updated Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

• Of the over 6.6 million FAFSAs submitted thus far, about 5% contained errors that would make students eligible for less financial aid than they are entitled to, the Education Department said Monday. The agency will begin automatically reprocessing these applications in the first half of April.

• Another 10% erroneously granted applicants access to too much aid. “Where adjustments would result in less aid to students, we will not reprocess unless asked to do so by schools after exercising their professional judgment,” Richard Cordray, chief operating officer of Federal Student Aid, said in a statement Tuesday.

Dive Insight:

In 2020, Congress directed the Education Department to simplify the FAFSA. The form acts as a gateway to federal student aid. Colleges and states also often use it as a guide to disburse their own aid.

But students and their families found the FAFSA grueling, requiring them to answer over 100 questions.

The updated version is much more streamlined and asks applicants to answer several dozen questions at most. However, the Education Department didn’t make the form public until late December — about three months after the typical release date — and the process has been plagued by technical glitches ever since.

Last week, the department pushed back the expected timeline for when applicants could update their submitted FAFSAs, shortening the window for corrections to be made. Just a few days before, it had said aid for dependents with assets had been miscalculated.

Continue Reading