The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, is now available to all users and running smoothly, the U.S. Department of Education announced on Thursday. You may keep your fingers crossed, if you like.
The announcement marks a pivotal moment in the continuing FAFSA saga. Throughout the 2024-25 cycle, technical errors and processing delays stymied students, parents, and college officials, injecting months of chaos into the enrollment process. Everyone with a stake in the federal-aid system has been hoping to avoid a sequel.
There won’t be one, according to the Education Department. “We now expect the FAFSA to work,” Under Secretary of Education James Kvaal said during a call with reporters on Thursday, “because it is already working.”
Still, several financial-aid experts told The Chronicle on Thursday that while they’ve seen significant progress in fixing the FAFSA this fall, some parts of the federal-aid engine still aren’t functioning properly. Until that changes, the full promise of the revamped process won’t be realized for all students, as well as colleges. Education Department officials acknowledged that they have more work to do.
The FAFSA has undergone seven weeks of extensive testing. In August, the department announced that it would make a fully functioning 2025-26 FAFSA available by December 1 — two months later than usual. The extra time allowed for several rounds of beta testing with relatively small cohorts of volunteers throughout the fall, enabling the department to identify and fix minor problems with the application. Earlier this week, the FAFSA was made available to all users. And on Thursday, the department declared the testing phase over — 10 days before its promised deadline. (Last year, the FAFSA didn’t become available until the end of December.)
Since the beta testing began, on October 1, more than 167,000 students have successfully submitted a FAFSA, the department said. Those forms have been processed and sent to more than 5,200 colleges. The department tested the application among students from various backgrounds, including those with at least one parent who lacks a Social Security number, a subgroup that encountered many roadblocks when trying to submit the 2024-25 FAFSA. As of Thursday, more than 3,200 students from mixed-status families have successfully submitted the form.
We had a Plan B and Plan C if the FAFSA didn’t open on time. I don’t think we’re going to have to enact those plans this time, with the FAFSA already open.
During beta testing, the department found no new critical bugs, Jeremy Singer, the department’s FAFSA executive adviser, said on Thursday. But the process enabled the agency to better understand “latent issues” from the 2024-25 financial-aid cycle. One example: Students getting stuck on specific pages of the application.
“Clearing the browser cache would have solved the problem, but they had no way of knowing that,” Singer said. “We knew the bug was out there, but we didn’t know what the root cause was. And during beta testing, by sitting side by side with students, our engineers were able to observe and diagnose the issue. Now it is fixed.”
The department said it has also stepped up support for families seeking help with the application. During the previous cycle, the FAFSA call center was understaffed and overwhelmed, a recent investigation by the U.S. Government Accountability Office revealed. Nearly three-quarters of all calls to the center — 4 million out of 5.4 million — went unanswered during the first five months of 2024. Since January, the department said, it has added 700 new staff to the call center (an increase of nearly 80 percent). It plans to add 225 more agents soon. And the call center will expand its hours on nights and weekends.
After the FAFSA was made available to all students this week, hold times were less than a minute, according to the department, and only 0.1 percent of callers hung up before getting help. But a barrage is surely coming. “We do expect to see a surge of users today … so wait times may be high,” Singer said. “If that happens, we expect it to subside quickly, given the increased call-center capacity and the reduced incidents causing students to call.”
The Education Department’s recent on-the-ground outreach has drawn some rave reviews.
“In terms of transparency and communication, there has been a significant increase in that,” Melinda Cabrera, president and chief executive of the Scholarship Foundation of Santa Barbara, told The Chronicle in October.
Cabrera’s organization participated in the beta testing. More than two-thirds of the students who attended an October 3 FAFSA event were able to submit the application, she said. “There were some issues that had to do with the software, especially for mixed-status families,” she said. “But I think that, over all, it was some of the situations that we come across anyway when we do these types of events, where maybe a contributor wasn’t present, or a student not having the correct information available.”
On Thursday, Christine Miller, director of college advising at the Scholarship Fund of Alexandria, in Virginia, beamed as she described a recent beta-testing session that her organization helped organize in October. The 100 or so students who attended the event successfully completed the FAFSA. “I felt good,” she said, “when they opened their Chromebooks and it got quiet — nobody said anything” — an indication that the form was working fine.
The experience stoked Miller’s confidence in the department. “So much of the work we do depends on students trusting in us, trusting that we know what we’re doing,” Miller said. “Now we can tell them, ‘We know that it worked. Go ahead and try it.’ That gives me a sense of peace going into this financial-aid cycle.”
On several college campuses, Thursday’s announcement prompted praise for the department — and cautious expressions of hope that there won’t be a repeat of the FAFSA crisis of 2024.
Stephanie Levenson, vice president for enrollment management at Monmouth College, in Illinois, said her institution has received a handful of processed FAFSAs so far, but she is waiting for the college’s software vendor to install updates so that her financial-aid staff can process them. “I’ve been encouraged by how the testing has gone, and by the fact that they opened the FAFSA for everybody on Monday. I would’ve thought it wouldn’t have opened until the last minute on December 1.”
Last winter, amid major delays in FAFSA processing, Monmouth invited families to use its net-price calculator to submit financial information, which the college used to create provisional-aid offers in absence of an official offer. It was an example of how the federal-aid crisis inspired institutions to get creative in devising workarounds. “We had a Plan B and Plan C if the FAFSA didn’t open on time,” Levenson said. “I don’t think we’re going to have to enact those plans this time, with the FAFSA already open.”
Levenson described herself as “optimistic but guarded” about the department’s recent efforts. “There is good progress being made,” she said, “but I still feel a little whiplash from last year. And I think it’s part of the trust-building process that needs to occur. There needs to be consistent forward momentum in being effective in how they’re rolling out things and keeping their promises. It’s still just going to take a long time to repair trust.”
Rachelle Feldman, vice provost for enrollment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, shared similar thoughts. Her institution was among those that participated in the FAFSA’s beta testing this fall. “There were a couple tiny hiccups in the very beginning, which was to be expected,” she said. “But the department solved them really quickly, sometimes in the middle of an event. Now, it seems like things are running pretty smoothly.”
While we’ve executed on many challenges, there are many more we need to deliver on in the coming months, which is what we will turn to next, because this work is not about a single magical fix.
So far, UNC has received about 2,800 processed FAFSAs. “The good news is they look fine — they look accurate,” Feldman said. “With the FAFSA opening earlier, it seems like a much more reasonable time frame for us to get aid offers out to our prospective students. I hope this will give families more confidence that it’s up and stable.”
But Feldman said she isn’t ready to celebrate all the way. She is concerned about a few aspects of the federal-aid process that still aren’t working properly, like the ability for colleges to submit corrections in bulk to students’ FAFSAs. The department recently announced that institutions would not be able to make “batch corrections” — a process that saves financial-aid offices a lot of time — until as late as the end of March.
“The FAFSA process is not all the way to where it needs to be,” Feldman said, “for us to really run our offices efficiently and serve students the best we can.”
The Education Department maintains a list of “known issues” with the FAFSA, many of which have been fixed over the last few months. But other problems remain unresolved nearly a year after the overhauled application debuted.
“The biggest one is the fact that students from mixed-status families are still not getting the fully simplified FAFSA experience,” said Jill Desjean, senior policy analyst at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, known as NASFAA. “Those families still have to manually enter their income information, like people had to do years ago, instead of transferring it directly from the Internal Revenue Service through the FAFSA. That’s really bothering us, because this is a population of students that’s especially vulnerable.”
Officials at the department have said that they are still working on a solution, but there’s no timeline for a fix.
During the 2024-25 cycle, many students from mixed-status families hit a roadblock when a glitch prevented their undocumented parents from obtaining a Federal Student Aid ID (FSA ID), which is required of all contributors to the form. The department introduced a temporary workaround, allowing such parents to bypass the cumbersome identity-validation process. That workaround — still in place for the 2025-26 cycle — enabled some families to complete the FAFSA, but others continue to encounter various problems with the form.
In a written statement on Thursday, Beth Maglione, NASFAA’s interim president and chief executive, said the department’s transparency during beta testing “exemplifies the kind of proactive disclosure our members need to effectively prepare for administering aid.” But, she added, the agency’s work is “far from complete.”
Singer, the department’s FAFSA executive adviser, said as much on Thursday. “While we’ve executed on many challenges, there are many more we need to deliver on in the coming months, which is what we will turn to next, because this work is not about a single magical fix. It is about continually iterating to build a better system that best serves the needs of families and partners.”
