The news frustrated Stephanie Levenson, but it didn’t surprise her. After all, she had been hearing about delays and technical problems with the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, ever since the form went live, at the end of 2023. “Every day there’s something,” she said. “It’s a soap opera.”
But Levenson, vice president for enrollment management at Monmouth College, in Illinois, was especially concerned about what her financial-aid director had told her: Many of the processed FAFSAs the college had received contained data discrepancies that would need to be resolved. Levenson also learned that financial-aid experts elsewhere are finding problems with the FAFSA calculation that determines each applicant’s eligibility for federal aid.
So Levenson took to X, formerly Twitter, and expressed her feelings about the latest FAFSA snags: “You can’t make this sh$t up.”
As March ends, patience with the so-called Better FAFSA is evaporating rapidly. The U.S. Department of Education announced that it had processed more than 4.4 million FAFSAs as of March 25, and many colleges have been receiving big batches of processed applications, known as Institutional Student Information Records, or ISIRs, over the last two weeks. But several financial-aid experts say that some of the data colleges have been receiving is flawed. And a substantial number of colleges are doubting their ability to get aid offers out within the next few weeks.
The department recently announced that a technical problem had resulted in inaccurate estimates of some applicants’ aid eligibility, which would require the government to reprocess and resend about 200,000 federal-aid forms to colleges this spring. But financial-aid directors at six institutions told The Chronicle that several other problems with the FAFSA — such as the form not correctly transferring tax information from the Internal Revenue Service — are causing headaches. Some colleges have reported the newfound issues to the department over the last week or so, but the agency has not yet publicly acknowledged all of them.
Yes, this is geeky, deep-in-the-weeds stuff. But if you care about college access and social mobility, and the diversity of the students who fill your quads and classrooms, not to mention your institution’s financial well-being, then the continuing complications with the FAFSA are your concern, too. Everywhere, anxious applicants are still waiting to find out what they would have to pay to attend the colleges on their lists. And until they finally receive that crucial information, the enrollment process will remain stuck in neutral.
What if colleges are building packages on a flawed piece of data, and then delivering a package that gets the family excited about what their cost is, and then we say, ‘Oops, we’ve got to pull it back’?
The latest turn in the FAFSA saga is stoking doubt in the department’s ability to deliver on its promises. Concerns about the integrity of federal-aid data flowing to institutions are prompting campus officials to question whether they can send financial-aid offers to accepted applicants before some or all of the known problems are fixed, which would mean even more delays.
And that, Levenson said, is putting many colleges in a bind. “Families are waiting, waiting, waiting for aid packages,” she said. “But what if colleges are building packages on a flawed piece of data, and then delivering a package that gets the family excited about what their cost is, and then we say, ‘Oops, we’ve got to pull it back’?”
Such questions are falling heavily on financial-aid officers, the unsung alchemists who turn data into aid offers, transforming names and numbers on applications into living, breathing tuition-payers.
Jayne Schreck, associate vice president for student financial planning at Monmouth, described the job as especially difficult this year. And uncertainty about FAFSA data is making it even more so.
While looking through ISIRs last week, Schreck noticed an “astronomical percentage” of married parents whose tax-filing status was coming through as “head of household,” which should be used only by unmarried filers. It’s the kind of discrepancy that a financial-aid officer — as a steward of federal, state, and institutional funds — is supposed to get to the bottom of before awarding aid.
When you have bad data, you just trust nothing.
Puzzled, Schreck combed through printouts of the raw data files received from the government to confirm the filing status of each of the parents. She saw that they all had filed correctly, as married filing jointly or married filing separately. But the federal software, she said, was misinterpreting the imported data and incorrectly displaying “head of household” on the students’ ISIRs.
Schreck, who has worked at Monmouth for nearly 30 years, has been trying to keep up with the relentless updates about the FAFSA’s technical issues. Each day, she and her three colleagues in the financial-aid office read the latest postings by the Education Department, the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, and Ellucian, the college’s software provider.
“There are more announcements than one person can catch up on and read in a day, so we divide and conquer,” Schreck said. “It’s everything we can do to keep up with all of it and still do our work.”
Amid a stretch of 12- to 14-hour days, Schreck didn’t immediately see the department’s announcement, just a few days later, that it had resolved the software issue that apparently had been causing the wrong tax-filing-status issue on students’ ISIRs. “Great news,” she said.
Still, even as some problems were disappearing, others were materializing. Schreck, like many of her counterparts elsewhere, has been regularly monitoring “underground chatter” on the popular Slack channel where financial-aid officers throughout the nation are sharing information about problems they’re encountering with the FAFSA.
The department maintains an official list of “open issues” (aka, problems) it has identified, and some have been resolved. But the Slack channel has become a go-to hub for cataloging problems as soon as they pop up, enabling members of the profession “to explore what we’re seeing together,” a financial-aid director at another college said, “when there isn’t communication happening in a timely manner from the other side.”
That virtual community is checking the government’s math — and noting things that don’t add up. And they are identifying issues that haven’t appeared on the official list.
Several members of the Slack group have detected apparent problems with a key feature of the revamped FAFSA: Applicants now must give consent for their federal tax information to be pulled in directly from the Internal Revenue Service, which was meant to ease the chore of manual data-entry and reduce user errors. The problem, financial-aid officers say, is that the FAFSA doesn’t seem to be consistently retrieving all the data points required to calculate the Student Aid Index, a number used to determine how much federal aid an applicant should get. And in such cases, the SAI is incorrect.
A financial-aid director at a private college on the East Coast told The Chronicle that he had discovered a handful of specific discrepancies, at least some of which other experts later confirmed that they, too, were seeing. For one thing, the FAFSA seems to be bringing over the wrong line from parents’ federal tax forms. Education credits don’t appear to be coming through in accurate amounts. Amended tax information isn’t transferring correctly. Ditto for adjusted gross income. Just how widespread those issues are isn’t clear.
Late Friday, the department announced that it was looking into those problems. Over the weekend, a department official said in a written statement that, based on an initial analysis the agency had conducted with the IRS, fewer than 20 percent of FAFSAs were affected by one of the issues.
As of March 29, 6.5 million federal-aid applications had been processed. So, if the problems affected, say, 15 percent of that total, we’re talking about 975,000 FAFSAs with incorrect tax data.
“The Department and IRS recognize how important it is that schools, states, and families have the information they need to package aid offers and make critical education decisions,” the official said. “We are continuing to work together on remedies for these issues, and the Department will provide regular updates to states, schools, and scholarship organizations on the affected population and next steps.”
We’re not going to move on those offers until we know that the FAFSA is stable, and right now, it’s not stable.
The financial-aid director, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he said he wasn’t permitted to speak publicly, was able to detect some issues by comparing the information from ISIRs with data from tax returns, which his institution collects from applicants’ families. “We’re in this unique position,” he said. “As these FAFSAs come in, we then can see, because we have tax information that parents have provided for us, where there are discrepancies. So my concern is, how do I resolve this conflict? Because on the one hand, I have an actual copy of the tax return that shows the correct information. On the other hand, I have the information that’s being transferred from the IRS through the FAFSA, which is incorrect.”
The college requires applicants to complete the CSS Profile, an aid application that’s much more detailed — and onerous — than the FAFSA. The information provided on that lengthier form allowed the college to create preliminary offers, including institutional aid and estimates of federal aid, which started going out last November, nearly two months before the FAFSA became available.
But the college won’t send out final offers until it has all the information it needs from the government to fold in federal aid. “If the information is not accurate, I can’t do that at the moment,” the director said. “We’re not going to move on those offers until we know that the FAFSA is stable, and right now, it’s not stable.”
Untangling the new FAFSA’s technical knots was always going to be a chore because of significant changes to the form, as well as to the federal-aid process. What makes the task especially challenging, though, is that colleges and their software providers have had so little time to test and troubleshoot this spring. The test ISIRs colleges received from the department in early March weren’t helpful, said Jeanette Phillips, executive director of financial aid at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona: “I think the department did the best they could, given the circumstances. But they didn’t pilot this until it was live. Who does that? Would any dot-com do that? It’s painful.”
Financial-aid officers had long expected to start receiving ISIRs in January, but then, on the penultimate day of that month, the department announced that the initial batches of files wouldn’t arrive until “the first half of March” — a bitter pill. The initial trickle of ISIRs didn’t start surging until the second half of March, and colleges have been receiving the files at different rates. The department said it began by delivering the data in smaller batches before ramping up the volume “in order to test, identify, and address any issues.” By doing so, the department sought to limit the number of FAFSAs that would need to be reprocessed later on.
On many campuses, tallying ISIRs has given way to tracking technical problems and inconsistencies that might further delay aid packaging. KC Woods, executive director of financial aid at Saint Mary’s College of California, hopes to get the bulk of aid offers out before April 13, when the college will host admitted students. “But how I can do that, and if I can do that, isn’t fully clear,” he said. “I’m concerned that we’re going to keep finding issues with the FAFSA.”
Just because the federal-aid process is chaotic right now doesn’t mean the full-on competition among colleges is on pause. On the contrary, all the disruption has intensified the pressure on campus decision makers, especially at tuition-dependent institutions. One glance at a few key statistics might worry any administrator.
Nationally, FAFSA submissions by high-school seniors were down about 30 percent from 2023 as of mid-March. So far, the FAFSA-completion rate for Saint Mary’s applicants is about 78 percent of what it was this time last year, which concerns Woods.
So, too, does the fact that the college, like many other institutions, has seen an abnormally high ISIR rejection rate — 20 to 25 percent, instead of the usual 5 percent. Typically, a rejection happens when the department determines that a FAFSA contains incorrect or incomplete information that needs to be corrected. Common errors include incorrect Social Security numbers, blank fields, and missing student or parent signatures. Though the department previously said applicants could make corrections in late March, it announced on March 25 that they would have to wait until “the first half of April,” after which the department will to reprocess all those forms — more rounds of nerve-racking delays.
Woods said the college will reach out to such admitted students and encourage them to make corrections, but there’s no way to know how many will follow through. And a college can’t send offers to students without valid ISIRs. “Being a small school, we don’t have a lot of room to miss our numbers,” Woods said. “So, losing just 10 or 20 students because of all that could be a big deal for us.”
Amid so much uncertainty, colleges must weigh the potential benefits of getting aid offers out quickly against prevalent concerns about FAFSA data. “It’s a really fine line,” Woods said. “If you wait, you might lose students to another school because they’re providing financial-aid packages sooner. But if you go early, without accurate data, you might have to peel back the offer later. But the schools that are extremely tuition driven probably can’t afford to wait.”
On the cusp of April, FAFSA angst was palpable.
In a March 28 letter to Education Secretary Miguel A. Cardona, the American Council on Education described challenges colleges have encountered when attempting to process the ISIRs. The letter, cosigned by more than a dozen other higher-ed associations, revealed many concerns: problems with federal software, difficulties updating the virtual mailbox through which colleges and the Federal Student Aid office securely exchange data, hours spent on the phone with the department’s support team “with no positive results.”
The letter included survey responses about FAFSA issues from 358 colleges. Two thirds of them said they didn’t believe they could process ISIRs within the next few weeks. Calling that goal “unrealistic,” the letter said that “it will take at least four to six weeks.” Thirteen percent of the colleges surveyed said they had already pushed back their May 1 deposit deadline; 47 percent said they plan to do so.
Schreck, at Monmouth, had hoped she could extend her first 50 to 60 aid offers before the end of March. Typically, the college sends a total of about 1,000, but in this turbulent cycle, with FAFSA-filing rates lagging, it might end up sending around 700.
After learning about the problems other institutions had uncovered, Schreck was a bit startled. Monmouth, like many colleges, doesn’t collect tax returns, so she had no information to compare with the ISIR data. “When you have bad data, you just trust nothing,” she said. “I don’t think I could put anything in the mail to a family that I feel confident putting my name on and trusting, until the federal government acknowledges whatever it is that’s wrong, and fully informs us.”
Days later, Monmouth had drawn up a new plan: It would send provisional aid offers with an accompanying letter explaining that the estimates are based on the data the college has received so far — and might be subject to change. “We are discussing the type of language we will use,” said Levenson, the vice president for enrollment management, “and how to keep families’ anxiety levels in check.”
Schreck, who has navigated numerous changes in the financial-aid process over the last 30 years, said she isn’t easily alarmed: “But at this late date, when families have nothing from a college that tells them what it’s going to cost, everything is alarming.”
