The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, must be fully functional for students and colleges this fall — even if its arrival is delayed by two months.
That’s what the National College Attainment Network (NCAN) and four other associations wrote in a letter to Education Secretary Miguel A. Cardona on Tuesday. As the start of the 2025-26 financial-aid cycle approaches, the letter says, “we are wrestling with the trade-off between timeliness and functionality, and have concluded that the consequences of releasing a product that does not come with full end-to-end functionality for students, families, state agencies, and aid administrators would be too great.”
The federal-aid crisis isn’t over. College-access experts and financial-aid officers expect at least some of the problems that dogged the FAFSA this year to continue into the next aid cycle. Many have grappled with a key question: Would it be better for the FAFSA to become available on time, or for the application to work properly?
Many experts see this as an either-or proposition. Throughout higher education, the apparent consensus is that the 2025-26 FAFSA would be better late than broken.
Typically, the FAFSA goes live on October 1, which is meant to give students ample time to complete the form while enabling colleges to get aid offers out sooner than they did in the past. But last year, after a major overhaul of both the application and the federal-aid system, the FAFSA didn’t become available until the end of December, and even then, it wasn’t fully functional or working as intended, throwing the entire financial-aid ecosystem into chaos. Numerous errors and glitches have hampered students, especially those with undocumented parents. And financial-aid officers have been scrambling for months to adjust to cascading delays and inconsistent FAFSA data.
Though the FAFSA had previously become available on October 1 each year since 2016, the application isn’t legally mandated to go live until January 1. Recently, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate introduced a pair of bills that would require the FAFSA to become available on October 1 instead. In early July, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce approved its bill with bipartisan support.
Some associations have expressed concern about the pending legislation. Though the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA) has long supported the codification of an October 1 release date for the FAFSA, the organization warned that doing so this year could have unintended consequences. “Cementing an October launch date only addresses a piece of the puzzle; consistency is another,” Karen McCarthy, NASFAA’s vice president for public policy and federal relations said in a written statement in early July. “Forcing an October 1 deadline this year does not guarantee a fully functioning form, and may in fact work against efforts to release a product that has been tested and found to run smoothly.”
Forcing an October 1 deadline this year does not guarantee a fully functioning form, and may in fact work against efforts to release a product that has been tested and found to run smoothly.
NASFAA was among the five organizations that signed the letter sent to the Education Department on Tuesday. Developing a well-functioning federal-aid system, the letter says, requires significant time for testing that would allow for the identification of problems students might encounter with the FAFSA: “This testing process cannot be shortchanged or skipped, or we will experience a repeat of this year — a never-ending game of whack-a-mole where workarounds are substituted for a holistic solution.”
Just a month ago, NCAN urged the department to confirm that the 2025-26 FAFSA would be ready by October 1. But Kim Cook, NCAN’s chief executive, said the organization reconsidered that position after concluding that there was no chance that a user-tested, smoothly operating FAFSA system would be up and running by that date. “A delay isn’t something we take lightly,” she said. “But we thought about where we are now, what we’ve seen from the department. It’s late July, and we want to give the form a fair runway to be worked on, improved, tested, and ready. And we’ve still got some big, outstanding issues in the current form that aren’t fixed.”
Department officials have said previously that they expect that the FAFSA will be available on October 1. At NASFAA’s annual conference, in Milwaukee, in June, Richard A. Cordray, who stepped down later that month as head of the Federal Student Aid office, said his staff was “working toward” that goal, though many financial-aid officers there who were knee-deep in the FAFSA crisis said they doubted that the department would deliver a functional form by then.
“Our profession understands that the department has a complex task on so many issues in addition to the FAFSA,” John Gudvangen, associate vice chancellor for enrollment and director of financial aid at the University of Denver, told The Chronicle at the time. “But we’re frustrated by the persistent roadblocks and less-than-fully transparent recognition of the FAFSA rollout. We’re concerned about the loss of credibility in the process.”
In a written statement on Tuesday, a spokesperson for the department said the agency appreciates feedback and advice from organizations representing students, state systems, and colleges: “We share their goal of launching a stable application that works for students and families as soon as possible and helping all students get the financial help they need to pay for college.”
One lesson from the FAFSA crisis is that even a successfully completed application does no one much good if colleges aren’t getting accurate, processed FAFSA data in a timely fashion.
Another lesson is that each delay, each technical snag, each announced workaround has downstream consequences for everyone with a stake in the federal-aid process.
On the cusp of a new admissions cycle, college counselors and community-based organizations that support students need to know: When should I schedule financial-aid night? How can I plan effectively? And when, for real, will the FAFSA roll out?
“What we know from our members,” said Cook, at NCAN, “is that we can’t have a repeat of this year, where there was not certainty, where counselors didn’t know what to expect and when.”
In the end, the timing of the FAFSA’s release perhaps isn’t nearly as important as clear communication and transparency from the department about when the FAFSA will be ready. “I’d rather hear this month that it’s going to be December — or, God forbid, January — and know what we’re dealing with,” Cook said, “rather than waiting it out and hoping for the best.”
Only to be unpleasantly surprised once again.
