Tayler Monts wasted no time filling out her financial aid form for college. The senior at KIPP High School in Camden, New Jersey, plans to be the first person in her family to pursue a higher education. She got started on the latest Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) shortly after its Dec. 30 online debut.
But she was confused by a question on the form, phrased as a double negative, she said. “I couldn’t go back in to fix it, even though on the website it says that I should theoretically be able to edit it.” She’s tried calling the Federal Student Aid hotline for help to no avail. “The lines are busy, so I’ve never gotten through.”
The new and shorter FAFSA was supposed to be easier to use. In fact, nearly 4 million people have submitted the 2024-’25 form since it became available, according to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. “And many are getting through those forms in record time,” he said Feb. 12 during a press call. For others, the opposite is true. Technical issues have prevented families from revising, completing or submitting the application. Students whose parents lack Social Security numbers are a key group of applicants unable to finish the form because of a system glitch.
A $1.8 billion error in the formula that specifies how much aid students get also caused confusion because it didn’t account for inflation. This led to some students who qualify for financial assistance reportedly being told they did not. The Department of Education has since fixed that problem, but other hiccups remain, leading to fears that colleges won’t be able to process families’ financial data until shortly before the May 1 deadline students generally have to commit to a college. The snafus could see students choosing colleges without knowing the financial assistance they might receive or putting off college because they refuse to take that risk or have lost patience with the process entirely, experts contend.
“It’s a huge problem,” said Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president of the Education Trust, which advocates for students, especially those of color or with low incomes, to achieve academic excellence. “It’s going to create equity issues, especially for those students who are the most dependent on financial aid, and we know that low-income students and students of color depend more on financial aid to finance their college education. If you don’t know before you have to make a deposit to an institution if you’re going to have enough aid to go, why would you do that? I’m concerned that it’s going to significantly impact the college-going decisions that students are making.”
Each year, roughly 17 million students use the FAFSA — most of whom are young women. During the 2021-’22 cycle, just over 11 million women students applied for aid using the form, compared with about 6.5 million men. Del Pilar fears that vulnerable students might decide to take a year off from college because of FAFSA difficulties, noting that many who paused their higher education when the COVID-19 pandemic began never returned. He doesn’t want to see a repeat of that trend.
Del Pilar, also a former financial aid counselor at Loyola Marymount University, said colleges can’t even begin putting a student’s financial aid award letter together until they receive the applicant’s financial data from the federal government. Colleges, he added, are desperately waiting to get that information, as are scholarship organizations such as Native Forward Scholars Fund.
“One of the main documents we use to verify [student] need is the FAFSA form,” said Angelique Albert, CEO of Native Forward, which provides scholarships to Native American students. “That will show any awards that they’ve gotten from the federal government. It will show the expected family contributions, and then it will show what is left for them to be able to go to college. So what is…
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