The U.S. Department of Education on Tuesday announced a long-awaited fix that it said would allow students whose parents lack a Social Security number to complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, which many such families have been unable to do since the online form became available late last year.
James Kvaal, the under secretary of education, said during a call with reporters on Tuesday that changes to the FAFSA system would “substantially streamline” the application process for mixed-status families. If the remedy works as described, it would ease what has arguably been the most vexing aspect of the form’s calamitous rollout. Problems with the recently revamped online application had been preventing many U.S.-born students with undocumented parents from completing the form.
Despite a recent fix meant to solve that problem, some parents without a Social Security number still haven’t been able to create an FSA ID, which all contributors — students and parents — must have to complete the FAFSA. Undocumented parents have also been unable to pull in their tax information from the Internal Revenue Service when filling out the FAFSA.
Until the latter issue is resolved, the department said, there’s a temporary solution: Contributors without a Social Security number must manually enter their tax information online, something that parents lacking an FSA ID have been unable to do. The department also said it would provide a temporary workaround to the identity-verification process that has been hindering undocumented parents from obtaining an FSA ID.
Now, contributors attempting to obtain an FSA ID for the first time who can’t validate their identity by answering the knowledge-based questions generated by TransUnion must still complete the manual verification process as before; but they will no longer have to wait until that process is complete before they can use their account username and password to access and complete the FAFSA. And contributors who have been waiting for the results of the identity-verification process may now use their StudentAid.gov account to “immediately access” the FAFSA, the announcement said. The department said it would email all such contributors to notify them of the change to the process.
The latest FAFSA news arrived on the eve of May 1, the traditional deposit deadline at selective colleges. Though many institutions have pushed back their deadlines to May 15 or June 1, others haven’t, ratcheting up the anxiety among applicants who are still awaiting financial-aid offers. Given that it’s the end of April, anyone might ask why the department didn’t make the just-announced changes much sooner. Like, say, on March 30?
The Chronicle put that question to a senior department official on Tuesday, but that official didn’t answer the question specifically, saying only that “we are focused now on streamlining the process and making it as easy as possible for students to complete the form. And so today’s news is part of our continuing efforts to improve the student experience and help as many people as possible complete the FAFSA as quickly as possible.”
The department also announced on Tuesday that it had completed reprocessing nearly all FAFSAs previously affected by known data issues, and that it had delivered Institutional Student Information Records, or ISIRs, for more than 8.3 million students to colleges, states, and scholarship organizations. Those developments, the agency said, should enable all colleges to create financial-aid offers. The department also said it had processed nearly a million FAFSA corrections.
“Students who complete a FAFSA today can expect their records to be sent to colleges within one to three days,” Kvaal said. “It’s been a challenging year for the FAFSA, but I’m proud of the progress we’ve made in recent weeks.”
Some college-access experts on the ground didn’t see much to celebrate on Tuesday. Sara Urquidez is executive director of the Academic Success Program, which provides college advising to 7,000 high-school seniors in Dallas, Houston, and College Station, Tex. She and her colleagues have been working closely with about 4,000 mixed-status families, many of whom have been unable to complete the FAFSA through no fault of their own.
“Today’s change is the latest development in the too little, too late strategy that the Department of Education has utilized for months,” Urquidez said in an email. “After months of waiting and missed state and institutional deadlines for financial aid, today’s announcement will likely do little to change the trajectory of the most vulnerable students of Class of 2024 and the families that rely on financial aid to help afford college. There is no reason that ED could not have made these changes in mid-March when it was clear that the FSA ID verification process was continuing to fail students and families. Instead, they ran out the clock on students who are wrapping up their senior year. On April 30, they finally decided to open access to students that have been excluded for months. It’s hard to call that a cause for celebration.”
Just 9 percent of the high-school seniors Urquidez’s organization advises have submitted an enrollment deposit so far. Typically, about 70 percent would have done so by the end of April. Though she said more mixed-status families have been able to submit the FAFSA over the last two weeks, she estimated that 900-1,000 are “very much still in limbo” due to various technical issues preventing them from completing the form. She doubted that the temporary fix the department announced on Tuesday would mitigate the many snags families have been encountering.
“Today’s announcement does little to address the continuous glitches in the form,” Urquidez said, “and the fact that many students are still unable to add their verified contributors to the form, that contributors are unable to activate the invitations sent to their email, and countless other technical issues that continue to prevent students from being able to successfully apply for financial aid. Students and families have acted in fidelity to the department, attempting every ‘workaround,’ temporary solution, filing paper FAFSAs, and continuing to wait for answers without an end date in sight. The ongoing failure and lack of appropriate guidance and solutions that benefit all students rests solely with the Department of Education. Many students have missed opportunities for state and institutional funding due to the lack of urgency to make this solution a priority.”
Sara Yelich Miller, executive director of Green Halo Scholars, a nonprofit group that helps low-income and first-generation applicants in the Chicago area, shared Urquidez’s concerns. “I’m skeptical, and so are my students,” she said. “I think the skepticism comes down to the total lack of faith I have in the department at this point.”
And she wondered: “Is it even fixed-fixed?”
The early returns didn’t inspire Miller’s confidence. On Tuesday evening, she helped two students with undocumented parents try to complete the FAFSA. But neither of them were able to connect their parents’ portion of the form with their account, she said — the same problem they had encountered before. And neither was able to delete their FAFSA, she said, to “start from square one as the parent.” She didn’t know what to tell them.
So had Tuesday’s announcement fixed all the problems that mixed-status families have been encountering with the form?
“Nope,” Miller wrote.
The weight of FAFSA worries have taken their toll on everyone with a stake in the federal-aid process. Students and parents. School counselors and college advisers. Enrollment leaders and financial-aid officials. And federal lawmakers, too.
On Tuesday morning, Education Secretary Miguel A. Cardona appeared before the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies to discuss the department’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2025. During the lively hearing, Cardona got an earful from legislators about the FAFSA rollout.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin and chair of the subcommittee, said she was deeply concerned about FAFSA completion rates to date. As of late April, just 33 percent of the high-school Class of 2024 had completed a FAFSA, down 29 percent compared with the same time last year, according to the National College Attainment Network’s analysis of the most recent federal data.
“I know you and your staff are working hard to fix these issues,” Senator Baldwin told Cardona, “but I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that we get this right.”
Later, she pressed him for an answer to a question that’s been looming over colleges: Will the 2025-26 FAFSA be ready to roll by October 1, as in the past, or will there be further delays?
“Students cannot bear another year of delays …” Senator Baldwin said. “Will you be able to reach the October 1st deadline?
“That is our expectation,” Cardona said, “to reach the October 1st deadline.”
Sen. Shelley Capito, Republican of West Virginia and the ranking member of the subcommittee, called the rollout of the FAFSA “an unmitigated disaster caused by an inexcusable failure of leadership.” She referred to a chart behind her showing that FAFSA completions among high-school seniors in her state were down 40 percent compared with this time last year, and down 35 percent among returning college students ages 25 and older.
“This has just got me totally undone,” Senator Capito said, “because it’s got everybody in my state and across the nation just appalled at how this could be handled so ineptly.”
Secretary Cardona insisted several times that he and his colleagues were taking the FAFSA problems seriously. He described the department’s daily efforts to help families, schools, and colleges work through challenges caused by problems with the form. He mentioned that the department was helping to plan FAFSA clinics and FAFSA webinars in various languages. “We recognize the importance of this,” he said, “and we’re doing everything in our power to make sure we’re providing more opportunities for students to fill out a better FAFSA.”
Under often-blistering criticism, Cardona appeared to remain calm throughout the hearing. “I acknowledge the frustration and challenges that families and schools are facing,” he said.
And he said something else that perhaps everyone in a deeply divided Congress could agree with: “Our kids deserve better.”
Even so, the enrollment clock keeps ticking. As May begins, time is of the essence for students, counselors, and financial-aid officials who are scrambling to overcome all the delays and glitches that so far have defined the so-called Better FAFSA.
On Tuesday, the department shared data from several states that reveal just how dire the situation is. In Arizona, just 32 percent of high-school seniors had completed the FAFSA. In Nevada, it’s 34 percent. In California and Texas, it’s well under 50 percent. Kvaal, the under secretary, said the department this week would step up outreach efforts in local and regional media markets throughout the country to promote the importance of completing the FAFSA. The initiative will target states — including the four above — with the largest FAFSA-completion gaps. “We will continue to do whatever we can to get students all the financial aid for which they are eligible,” Kvaal said, “and to help colleges make financial-aid offers as quickly as possible.”
Still, some questions have no concrete answers, such as: When would the department start processing paper FAFSAs? Some applicants who weren’t able to complete the online form mailed in the paper version instead. But some haven’t received a confirmation that their form was received.
“We are working hard on the capacity to process those paper FAFSAs,” a senior department official said on Tuesday, declining to say how many had been submitted. “And when we have more news to share on what to expect, we will communicate that to schools and our other partners.” Meanwhile, the department is advising students to complete the online version of the application.
On the cusp of enrollment-deposit season, some colleges are in much better shape than others, as an online poll conducted last week by the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, or NASFAA, revealed. Of 669 member colleges that responded to the question, 46 percent said they had already sent aid offers to some or all accepted applicants, and 10 percent said they had begun packaging those offers and expected to start sending them out by the end of April. But 44 percent said they had not yet begun assembling aid offers.
In response to another question, just 30 percent of respondents said they had received a submitted FAFSA from at least 51 percent of their admitted first-year students.
In a written statement, Justin Draeger, president and chief executive of NASFAA, offered a mixed appraisal of the department’s announcement. “We are pleased to see the department make forward progress on its timeline to provide accurate student FAFSA information to colleges and universities, so they can complete the work of packaging and delivering financial-aid offers to students,” he said on Tuesday. But though he expressed hope that the temporary fix would help mixed-status families, he said that, for many of them, “the damage may have already been done, and the proposed solution still does not fully offer mixed-status families the full benefits of the simplified form.”
It was an imperfect solution to an imperfect situation on a day when FAFSA frustrations were palpable in Washington.
At the hearing on Capitol Hill, Sen. Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, described the “real-life consequences” of the form’s many problems. She said she had heard from many constituents — students, parents, financial-aid officers — who expressed “extreme frustration” with the FAFSA. “I believe,” she said, “the department owes them an apology.”
But on this day, at least, they didn’t get one.
