What’s New
The U.S. Department of Education on Tuesday began the second phase of beta-testing for the 2025-26 Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. It’s the next step in the department’s plan to let thousands of students throughout the nation complete the federal-aid form before December 1, when it’s scheduled to become available to all students and contributors.
The department will continue to conduct extensive tests of the FAFSA among increasingly larger cohorts of prospective and current students throughout the fall. The goal: to identify and resolve any technical issues that might hinder large numbers of applicants down the line — and to avoid another federal-aid crisis.
It’s early. But, so far, the FAFSA test-drive is going smoothly, according to department officials. The first phase was “a complete success,” Jeremy Singer, FAFSA executive adviser, said during a call with reporters on Tuesday. “The system is working from end to end.”
The Details
During the initial phase of testing, which was completed the first week of October, six community-based organizations (CBOs) in various states hosted FAFSA events for students. Department staff were on hand to observe and assist applicants and their families.
More than 650 high-school seniors in all successfully submitted a FAFSA, according to the department. In response to The Chronicle’s questions about how many students participated in the events — and how many might have tried to submit the form but were unable to do so — a department official said in a written statement on Tuesday that about 80 percent of all FAFSAs initiated were submitted. The most common reason forms weren’t completed right away, the official said, was that the student needed their contributor, or parent, to fill out their section of the form.
Melinda Cabrera, president and chief executive of the Scholarship Foundation of Santa Barbara, one of the CBOs that participated in the beta-testing, said more than two-thirds of the students who attended an October 3 FAFSA event were able to submit the application, which she described as a high success rate. “There were some issues that had to do with the software, especially for mixed-status families,” she told The Chronicle on Tuesday. “But I think that, overall, it was some of the situations that we come across anyway when we do these type of events, where maybe a contributor wasn’t present, or a student not having the correct information available.”
Though the testing revealed bugs, as expected, none, Singer said, were “critical errors.” But one familiar problem popped up. According to the department’s list of updates on FAFSA-testing, 60 forms submitted in early October were initially rejected, mostly due to a missing student or parent signature: “The Department recognizes this is an ongoing issue from 2024–25 and we continue to explore ways to decrease these rejections, especially with better prompting for student and parent signatures.” Students whose FAFSAs were rejected were able to correct and resubmit the form, Singer said.
Data from the beta-testing events helped the department learn more about an “unknown error” message that some users have been encountering for months, for no apparent reason, when trying to complete the FAFSA process. The rollout of several fixes, the department said in an October 10 update, resulted in a “sharp decline in ‘unknown error’ messages.”
In the end, nearly 600 colleges received a total of more than 6,200 processed FAFSAs, the department said. Many institutions won’t be able to download and test those processed forms, known as Institutional Student Information Reports, into their systems until their software vendors make necessary updates, however.
The second testing phase will include 16 organizations. Half are colleges, which will ask returning students to complete the form for the 2025-26 aid cycle. This time around, the department expects more than 1,000 students to submit a FAFSA.
The current round of FAFSA testing will include current and prospective students from a range of backgrounds, allowing the department to see how the form works for applicants representing various populations, including first-generation students and applicants from mixed-status families, as well as those with varying family configurations and income levels.
The Backdrop
The rollout of the 2024-25 FAFSA was disastrous. Numerous technical problems with the form, cascading delays, and major issues with FAFSA data upended the financial-aid process at institutions everywhere. The saga has tested the patience of college leaders and federal lawmakers, prompting hearings on Capitol Hill and an investigation by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which in September released a blistering report on the FAFSA fiasco and its causes.
In short, most everyone with a stake in the federal-aid process has been fretting for months about the rollout of the 2025-26 FAFSA, crossing their fingers that the next aid cycle won’t be a repeat of the last one.
To ensure that it’s not, the department announced in August that it would delay the FAFSA’s release by two months and conduct multiple rounds of beta-testing meant to deliver a fully functioning form. “We remain on track,” James Kvaal, undersecretary of education, said on Tuesday, “to make the FAFSA available to all students and families no later than December 1.”
The Stakes
The beta-testing isn’t just an attempt to “find bugs and squash them,” as Singer said recently. It’s also an outreach campaign to restore the public’s faith in the Education Department and Federal Student Aid office (FSA) after months of missteps and broken promises.
Cabrera, at the Scholarship Foundation of Santa Barbara, told The Chronicle she was encouraged by the support the department provided to students during the testing event — and by what she described as its recent attentiveness to the concerns of college-access organizations. “In terms of transparency and communication, there has been a significant increase in that,” she said. “FSA has been really open to receiving feedback.”
The stakes are high, especially for low-income and first-generation students. “This is an opportunity to gain their trust,” Cabrera said. “We lost students last year who weren’t able to complete the FAFSA. We can’t afford to lose any more students, and we can’t afford any more students who experience extreme anxiety over this. The FAFSA should be one stepping stone in their process of enrolling in college. This shouldn’t be the hill that they have to climb to get there.”
