The U.S. Department of Education announced on Tuesday that colleges will not be able to submit corrections to students’ federal-aid records in bulk during the 2024-25 financial-aid cycle. In June, the department announced that institutions would be able to do so in the first half of August — several months later than usual.
The upshot: Some students might not get the money they need in time to pay bills and start classes.
The catastrophic rollout of the revamped Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, has been beset by numerous delays, errors, and glitches that have hindered students and colleges ever since the form became available late last December. The latest snag will further hamper the most vulnerable students, many of whom remain stuck in FAFSA limbo, still waiting for financial-aid offers on the cusp of the fall semester.
The department’s announcement concerned “batch processing,” which enables financial-aid officers to accurately and efficiently submit FAFSA corrections in bulk. That process, which allows colleges to submit hundreds or thousands of corrections to FAFSA records, must be complete before students can receive official financial-aid offers and get their disbursements. In the absence of batch corrections, financial-aid officers must manually submit corrections, which is tedious and time-consuming.
Beth Maglione, interim president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA), described the announcement as “a stunning failure” on Tuesday. “Once again, the Department of Education has failed to provide a key FAFSA deliverable when promised,” she said in a written statement. “Some college students might not have financial-aid dollars in their hands in time to start classes in the next few weeks.”
Meanwhile, financial-aid officers worn thin by months of chaos in the federal-aid system will have to put in even more work to clean up the department’s latest mess. “It’s the difference between pushing a button” Maglione said, “versus making thousands of keystrokes.”
Normally, colleges can submit batch corrections as soon as the FAFSA goes live, typically on October 1. The process allows financial-aid offices to assist applicants with special circumstances, such as those requesting a dependency override, or those with parents who recently lost their job — changes that require the institution to make a correction to a FAFSA. The department’s latest misstep will surely hinder students with unique circumstances, including students who’ve been abused or disowned by parents, or who are experiencing homelessness.
Some college students might not have financial-aid dollars in their hands in time to start classes in the next few weeks.
“We’re talking about ‘life happens’ situations that students confront as they’re getting ready to enroll, people for whom the traditional tax data from two years ago don’t reflect what they’re currently going through,” said Bryce McKibben, senior director of policy and advocacy at the Hope Center at Temple University. “I’m just incredibly worried about the students who are going to give up. It’s almost the beginning of August, and there are students who do not have either a financial-aid offer at all, or an accurate one that reflects their circumstances.”
For some federal-aid applicants, the situation could pose an immediate crisis. “Students need their financial aid for security deposits on apartments, getting groceries for the first week of class, arranging transportation, and more,” McKibben said. “Delays in disbursements means more basic needs insecurity, and more students dropping out of college.”
The department said in its announcement that it wouldn’t make batch corrections available again until the 2025-26 financial-aid cycle, though it did not specify when. “We know this decision creates additional burdens for institutions that are already experiencing a heavy workload and increased demands during this extraordinary FAFSA processing cycle,” the announcement said. The agency will offer free technical assistance to help colleges submit individual corrections via an electronic portal that more than 2,800 institutions have used over the last month.
The department said it decided against making batch corrections available this year because, after months of delays, many colleges wouldn’t be able to use them before the beginning of their fall semesters. The department also said it was “prioritizing the development of a well-tested, robust, and end-to-end launch” of the 2025-26 FAFSA.
But where does that leave students still hung up by the failures of the 2024-25 FAFSA?
“While we understand that resources are finite and ensuring next year’s FAFSA is fully functional is critical,” Maglione, at NASFAA, said, “the federal government is still obligated to ensure this year’s students are able to access critical funds.”
The FAFSA crisis isn’t over, and many problems with the federal-aid process remain.
In a separate announcement on Tuesday, the department said it would finish processing paper FAFSAs within two to three weeks, but that corrections for paper FAFSAs wouldn’t be available until the end of September — nearly two months later than it had said previously. “Applicants and contributors can make corrections to processed paper forms online,” the department said, “and we encourage them to do so when possible.”
The department also announced that it would extend a temporary fix for parents without a Social Security number into the 2025-26 cycle. Such parents will be able to access the FAFSA before completing an identity-validation process. And that will continue, the agency said, until it develops a long-term solution to the validation process “that avoids the delays and confusion associated with the current process,” and allows undocumented parents to transfer their tax information to the FAFSA.
All three announcements were reminders that, after years of development, months of headaches, and countless hours of angst, the revamped FAFSA remains a work in progress as the next financial-aid cycle approaches.
Since 2016, the FAFSA has become available on October 1. But last week, NASFAA and four other associations sent a letter to Education Secretary Miguel A. Cardona stating that the form must be fully functional for students and colleges this fall — even if its arrival is delayed by two months.
Samantha Hicks, assistant vice president for financial aid and scholarships at Coastal Carolina University, has been adjusting to a FAFSA-related curveballs all year. After seeing the announcement about batch corrections on Tuesday, she felt dismayed. “This one,” she posted on X, “has just about broken me.”
Hicks later told The Chronicle that about 200-250 incoming and returning students at Coastal Carolina have FAFSAs that need a correction. “That doesn’t sound terrible, but it’s July 30th, and our payment deadline is August 15th,” she said. “So now we have to create a new process, and learn the ins and outs of how to do it. And anytime you do manual work, there’s room for human error.”
Hicks described a deeper concern. Like many financial-aid officers, she has found herself questioning whether she can trust what she hears from the federal government. “We’re not upset about the work — we can handle hard work,” she said. “But if the system is broken bad enough on July 30 that you’re not going to have this available for a full year, you can’t tell me you didn’t know that in June. That lack of transparency, it’s just frustrating.”
Finally, Hicks, who was a first-generation college student, said she shares the widespread concern that some students still waiting for corrections will “get so frustrated that they say, ‘I’m bowing out.’ It’s just a very vulnerable population. So I worry that they don’t have the resources to know that there are ways to work through this.”
So many shoes have dropped during the FAFSA crisis that it’s hard to keep them all straight. But it’s fair to say that the latest setback concerning batch corrections, like so many problems before it, will fall heavily on the students with the greatest needs — the same ones who the so-called “Better FAFSA” was meant to help.
