Gabriella Angotti-Jones for NPR
Families have a lot of questions right now about how much help they’ll get paying for college — questions that financial aid offices can’t yet answer.
That’s because this year’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is months behind schedule. And to make things really complicated, it includes a mistake that would have cost students $1.8 billion in federal student aid.
We covered the mistake in detail here. In a nutshell: The U.S. Education Department’s FAFSA math, for deciding how much aid a student should get, is wrong.
In practice, this mistake would make some students and families appear to have more income than they really do, and that means they would get less aid than they should. And not just federal financial aid but also all sorts of state and school-based aid.
On Tuesday, a department spokesperson confirmed to NPR that the department will fix this mistake in time for the 2024-2025 award year, though the spokesperson could not provide details on how or how quickly the fix will be made. For the first time, the department also gave a sense of just how much federal student aid is at stake: $1.8 billion.
“The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to making higher education possible for more students, including through ensuring students qualify for as much financial aid as possible,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
The FAFSA mistake had college financial aid offices worried
“The polite way to say it is, wow. I mean, I was shocked.”
That’s how Brad Barnett, the financial aid director at James Madison University in Virginia, describes learning about the mistake.
“I get that there’s complexities in building and programming a new system. OK. But forgetting to put the right numbers into a table that now has created all this consternation and delays really surprised me.”
The FAFSA is new this year because Congress passed a law ordering the Education Department to make sweeping changes. The idea was to make it easier to fill out and to give more lower-income families access to federal aid. Families like Myrna Aguilar’s.
“I am a single parent. In addition to my son, my mom lives with us, so we’re a multigenerational family, which is awesome,” Aguilar told NPR.
Aguilar’s son, David Thornton, is studying mechanical engineering at Cal Poly Pomona in Southern California, where he just finished his first semester.
“It was fun,” Thornton says, wearing a hooded sweatshirt emblazoned with “Cal Poly Pomona College of Engineering.” “There were a lot of events that I really enjoyed. My classes were very interesting. Stressful, but interesting.”
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