‘Frustration All Around’: The FAFSA’s Rocky Rollout

The Department of Education began the “soft launch” of the simplified Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, last weekend, but many students and parents so far haven’t been able to access it. That’s because the online form has been only intermittently available while the department continues to iron out some kinks.

Covey Denton, a science teacher in Wilson, N.C., woke up at 6 a.m. on New Year’s Eve and tried to log in to the FAFSA on her computer and then on her phone — no dice. She and her son, Elijah, a high-school senior, hit refresh on multiple devices every 10 minutes for hours, eager to complete the form together before he returned to the public boarding school he attends, in Durham.

About two hours before the big ball dropped in Times Square, Denton and her son finally gave up for the day. “It was just frustration all around,” Denton said. Her son, an aspiring ornithologist with stellar grades, has received acceptances from a handful of colleges with strong wildlife-biology programs. He’s wary of taking on too much debt.

But until he gets aid offers from those institutions, he won’t know how much it would cost to attend each one. And those colleges can’t send those aid offers until he submits the FAFSA, which is used to determine eligibility for federal grants, loans, and work-study jobs.

“A pause has been put on everything,” Denton, a single mother of three, said on Monday afternoon. “There are need-based scholarships he wants to apply for, with early-January deadlines, that require the FAFSA. He is very anxious about it. He’s like ‘What am I supposed to do?’”

As the new year began, uncertainty reigned over the process that the streamlined FAFSA was meant to simplify. Congress required that the form, which normally goes live on October 1, become available by January 1. Later last year, the Education Department announced that the new FAFSA would open by December 31, after which it would “monitor and respond in real time to potential issues” during the soft launch.

Then, on Sunday, the Education Department released an updated statement explaining that applicants could access the form “for periods of time over the coming days while we monitor site performance and respond … to any potential issues impacting applicant experience.” But the announcement didn’t specify when the soft-launch phase would end or how long the planned outages would last.

Frustrations flared from coast to coast. Though the Education Department said in its announcement that it had “uncovered some minor issues affecting users,” some users who took to social media described their failed attempts to submit the form as anything but minor. They shared screen shots of the messages they encountered. One said: “Sorry, StudentAid.gov is currently unavailable. We’re working on fixing it! Thanks for your patience.” Another said: “Please Wait. StudentAid.gov is busier than normal. You’ll be able to proceed to the site shortly.” Many shared error messages that had them stumped.

On X, formerly known as Twitter, students and parents aired their gripes. “FAFSA put me in a waiting room and still hasn’t opened for me yet,” one posted. Completing the FAFSA, another wrote, “should not be worse than dealing with Ticketmaster.”

Some users pushed back on an X post from the Federal Student Aid office that said applicants would have “ample time” to complete the form and didn’t need to rush to fill it out right away. “Every school is sending out communications asking for the FAFSA to be filled out ASAP,” one parent replied. “All need-based scholarships requiring the FAFSA as well. Huge disconnect here. Extremely frustrating and disappointing!”

Financial-aid experts chimed in, too. “Even by soft-launch standards, this weekend’s rollout was challenging and students, families, and financial aid administrators who have been waiting for this release for months are understandably frustrated,” said Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, in a written statement. “Frustration will likely continue because even if they fill out the FAFSA today, we still don’t have an exact date of when schools will receive FAFSA applicant data, so financial aid administrators can begin building and communicating financial aid packages.”

As the Education Department announced last fall, colleges won’t receive applicants’ FAFSA data right away. Forms submitted during the soft launch, the department said in an X post on Monday, won’t reach institutions, states, and scholarship organizations until the end of January. And that will surely push back the delivery of aid offers to many applicants throughout the country.

That worries Sara Urquidez, executive director of ASP Dallas & Houston, an organization that helps low-income and first-generation students complete the admissions and financial-aid process each year. “Many colleges have limited staff and resources, and so the timeline is just going to be super-compressed for seniors,” she said. “I think we’re going to see an enrollment drop, probably akin to what we saw during Covid. Logistically, it just doesn’t feel like there’s going to be enough time to be able to adequately get all students through the process, for colleges to get aid offers out, and to go over those offers with students and parents. I just can’t make the the math make sense in my head.”

Though Texas has pushed back its priority deadline for financial aid this year, it is among the many states that dispense financial aid on a first-come, first-served basis. In a normal financial-aid cycle, students with the greatest financial need often struggle to complete the FAFSA process. But this cycle will continue to be anything but normal.

On New Year’s Day, Urquidez received a text from a student who said they hadn’t been able to create an FSA ID — an account username and password required to gain access to the FAFSA — for their undocumented parent. She anticipates that the new process for creating such an ID for parents without a Social Security Number will be a significant challenge for many families her organization serves. “The financial-aid process already takes so much extra time for students who lack resources, who don’t have parents who are going to be able to just sit down and figure this out,” she said. “To say there’s no rush to complete this form shows a true lack of understanding of how nuanced this process is for many families.”

Jennifer Steen, a college and career counselor at Arcadia High School, in Phoenix, has been telling her students that everything will be OK despite the anxiety that the delayed FAFSA might cause some of them: “I’m saying ‘We’ve got your backs, please try to exhale.’”

Though Steen didn’t think the FAFSA’s delayed rollout would negatively affect most of her students, she said that for a handful of early-decision applicants and recruited athletes she advises, delays in financial-aid offers could prove problematic. She described one senior who had received an acceptance and a less-than-sufficient aid offer from her first-choice college on the East Coast, which uses the CSS Profile, an onerous form used by many private colleges, to calculate its aid awards. “That offer is not going to be doable for this family,” Steen said, “but they’re not going to know what Plan B is because they’re not going to know what kind of need-based aid she will get from an in-state public university that has admitted her for a long time, because of the FAFSA.”

Steen said she felt confident that most colleges would adjust to this year’s timeline as quickly as possible. But she expects uncertainty to continue right on through May 1, the traditional deposit deadline at many colleges.

“We have no idea what the Department of Education’s capacity is to process these FAFSAs,” she said. “This thing is not ready for prime time, it’s not confidence-inspiring. We just want to know: When is it actually going to work?”

The Education Department said that the application had been open for a half-hour window on each of the last two days of December, for two hours on Monday, and then for six hours on Tuesday. More than 150,000 applications had been submitted by the end of Tuesday, according to the department, and more than 250,000 applicants were in progress, which typically means that a user has completed their portion of the FAFSA and contributor needs to complete their portion.

“Integrating real-time learning and pauses is consistent with best practices,” the department said in a written statement, “especially for a new website that is required to provide permutations for many different peoples’ situations and includes updating dozens of systems, some of which have not been updated in almost 50 years.”

In short, major overhauls can be a bear for everyone involved.

But by Tuesday, Covey Denton, the mother in North Carolina who spent New Year’s Eve trying to access the FAFSA, had gone from anxious to relieved. She finally managed to get her son logged in around 8 p.m. on New Year’s Day. The site, she said, was slow to load, and after losing their connection at one point, they had to start the application over. But he completed it in under an hour. And she planned to tackle her part of the application this coming weekend.

On Tuesday, Denton’s son received a reassuring email from his college counselor, which eased his stress. He also got some welcome messages from colleges saying that they would adjust their deadlines for scholarships requiring the FAFSA.

But they encouraged him, Denton said, to submit it as soon as possible.