Nobody wants to see a sequel to the devastating federal-aid crisis of 2024. But will we get one anyway?
The question has been looming over higher education for months. And this week marks the beginning of a crucial new chapter in the continuing saga of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as the FAFSA. What happens next will likely determine whether the next financial-aid cycle gets off to a promising start, albeit two months later than usual — or whether another round of headaches is coming.
Starting this week, hundreds of college applicants will get to test-drive the 2025-26 FAFSA, as part of a new beta-testing process that the U.S. Department of Education says will help it ensure a smooth rollout later this fall. Here are a few quick things to know.
The first round of beta testing starts Tuesday.
Normally, the FAFSA becomes available to students and parents on October 1. But, as in the previous financial-aid cycle, there will be a significant delay.
In August, the U.S. Department of Education announced that it will make the 2025-26 form available to all students and contributors by December 1, following a two-month testing period. Starting on Tuesday, hundreds of high-school seniors served by six community-based organizations (CBOs) throughout the country will begin submitting their federal-aid forms.
“These are real FAFSAs, and we’re testing a complete FAFSA system,” James Kvaal, undersecretary of education, said during a call with reporters on Monday. “The department will process those FAFSAs, give students an opportunity to make corrections, if needed, and send the records to colleges and state agencies. Colleges will be able to use these same records when it’s time for them to make financial-aid offers.”
Our goal is to find bugs and squash them before December 1.
The department said the first testing phase will include nearly 1,000 students. It expects that three more rounds of testing throughout the fall will include tens of thousands of applicants. The subsequent phases will include 20 CBOs, 10 high schools or school districts, and 48 colleges from various regions.
Jeremy Singer, the FAFSA executive advisor, said that extensive testing would enable the department to identify and resolve any technical issues before the application is open to all users. “This is a common practice, done pretty much by every software organization worth their salt,” he said. “Our goal is to find bugs and squash them before December 1.”
Colleges want greater transparency.
The disastrous rollout of the 2024-25 FAFSA wasn’t just a collection of technical failures. It was also a series of communication breakdowns, as new findings from the U.S. Government Accountability Office released last week made clear. For instance, the department apparently knew major FAFSA-processing delays were inevitable long before January 30. That was when it informed colleges that they wouldn’t start receiving processed FAFSAs at the end of January, as previously promised; instead, they had to wait until mid-March.
That shocking revelation disrupted colleges’ financial-aid timelines — and demoralized financial-aid officers already scrambling to overcome delays in the FAFSA process. “Some of the frustration that we felt was really about those 11th-hour announcements,” Beth Maglione, interim president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA), told The Chronicle on Monday. “There was a problem with communication feeling disingenuous. Sometimes, bad news would be buried deep inside otherwise straightforward announcements.”
The department said in a news release on Monday that it is “committed to sharing information about the FAFSA beta broadly with all stakeholders.” And it plans to provide regular updates about its progress online.
Maglione said she was cautiously optimistic that the department and the Federal Student Aid office, known as FSA, would be more transparent in the months ahead. “We’re going to be watching to see if they carry out their commitment to this notion of working in public and informing the community of how the testing is going, what bugs they’re finding,” she said. “That’s new and different, and we are really hopeful that that will keep our members in the know as we move forward.”
Resolving problems quickly will be crucial.
Telling people about the FAFSA problems that students and colleges encounter is one thing; fixing them is another.
“We’ll be watching for bugs being resolved from one round of testing to the next,” Maglione said. “Hopefully, the list of issues doesn’t just keep growing, and we’re actually seeing progress on resolving them.”
Kim Cook, chief executive of the National College Attainment Network, known as NCAN, echoed Maglione’s thoughts on Monday. She said that many of her organization’s members were encouraged by what they had heard from Singer and other department officials who spoke at NCAN’s national conference, in mid-September: “They finally feel like there’s some transparency. They’re encouraged by the testing plan.”
But all the transparency in the world surely can’t guarantee a glitch-free FAFSA by December 1. “Functionality will be top of mind — making sure that the form is working the way it should,” Cook said.
Cook plans to keep a close eye on the experiences of mixed-status families during the testing process. During the 2024-25 aid cycle, many such families couldn’t complete the identity-verification process due to problems with the application system. In April, the department announced one temporary solution: FAFSA contributors without a Social Security number would no longer be required to complete the manual verification before a student could receive federal aid.
That change will be extended into the 2025-26 aid cycle and until a permanent fix is in place. But will that temporary solution work any better this time around?
Problems from the 2024-25 cycle remain.
As much as everyone with a stake in the federal-aid process might wish to turn the page on the disastrous 2024-25 financial-aid cycle, it’s not yet possible to do so. After all, various problems with the FAFSA remain.
The GAO found that as of early September, just 35 of 55 “known defects” had been resolved. “We are continuing to work to improve the FAFSA, both for this year and for next year,” a senior department official said on Monday. “We have addressed all critical … defects facing the FAFSA, and students are able to complete the FAFSA and submit it, and have it processed and sent to their college. So, in some cases, there are workarounds. The user experience is not always what we had initially hoped, but the FAFSA is up and running for students.”
We’re not serving the students the way we need to.
But that’s hardly a gratifying answer for any student who’s still stuck due to FAFSA problems — like those who filed a paper application but haven’t been able to get corrections to their forms processed. “We are in the process of testing paper corrections functionality, and unfortunately, the fail rate has been higher than is acceptable,” Singer, the FAFSA executive advisor, said on Monday. “So, we are working closely with the contractor to get this addressed. We’re making adjustments and also exploring potential workarounds.”
Singer said the department would release more information about the issue this week. “Clearly, this is unacceptable,” he said. “It’s gone on too long, and we’re not serving the students the way we need to.”
Another problem: Colleges weren’t able to submit corrections to students’ federal-aid records in bulk during the 2024-25 financial-aid cycle due to problems with the FAFSA system. That important function, known as “batch processing,” enables financial-aid offices to submit hundreds or thousands of corrections to FAFSA records, which must be completed before students can receive their official financial-aid offers. Because batch corrections weren’t available, financial-aid officers had to manually submit corrections this year, which often proved to be a tedious and time-consuming chore.
The department has said that colleges still won’t be able to submit batch corrections when the FAFSA goes live on December 1. It’s not yet clear when institutions will be finally be able to do so. “That’s a bummer,” said Maglione, at NASFAA. “To say that’s disappointing to our members would be an understatement.”
The FAFSA overhaul isn’t just about the form.
On Monday, Kvaal, the undersecretary of education, described several steps the department is taking to improve the FAFSA experience: “We’ve heard from stakeholders that students, families, and their advisers need more information to help them complete the FAFSA.”
In response, the department has released an updated Federal Student Aid Estimator, which gives applicants an estimate of their Student Aid Index and eligibility for federal Pell Grants. It will also provide a stand-alone “parent wizard,” a tool that helps applicants determine which family members must complete the form.
Kvaal added that the agency has been “overhauling” FSA, in part by appointing several new senior leaders who will be overseeing key initiatives. And he described FSA’s recent efforts to ensure greater accountability among vendors that work on the form.
“Students and families expect and deserve better support from FSA,” he said, “and unless FSA has the leadership resources and strong management practices it needs, even the best policy ideas will remain only promises on paper.”
