Is the FAFSA Ready for Prime Time?

Inside Higher Ed

Liam Knox

November 20, 2024

This year’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid is now widely available to students and is set to launch officially any day now—Education Department officials said in a press call last week that they expect it will be live by Friday.

After bringing in outside help and putting the form through two months of rigorous testing, the department opened the 2025–26 FAFSA to all students on Monday, in what it called “Expanded Beta Phase 4.” Department officials clarified to Inside Higher Ed that the form was still technically in the testing phase but was functionally open and had been expanded to ensure the system could handle a large volume of users.

Since Monday, students have submitted more than 50,000 FAFSA forms and partially completed 100,000 more, on top of the roughly 17,000 forms submitted throughout the testing period.

Colleges say that so far, the system is working with relatively few hitches. The University of Illinois Chicago helped the department test the FAFSA over the past month. In that time it received 1,200 student forms and has already processed about two-thirds of them.

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