If no one in your family has applied for college recently, you may not be familiar with the unending mental torture of filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, commonly known as the FAFSA and usually spoken alongside a curse word or two.
Created by Congress in 1992, FAFSA is required for all federal financial aid applications including loans, grants and work-study. Roughly half of high school seniors fill it out every year. Several states even require students to fill it out to graduate from high school, since the mere act of completing the form has been linked to higher college enrollment rates, especially among lower-income families.
Despite financial aid’s importance to the future of our country’s young people, FAFSA has long been a byzantine nightmare, like filling out your taxes but with your child’s future at stake instead of just an IRS audit. This year, a long-running effort to simplify and reform the FAFSA somehow made things even worse.
First, a significant overhaul of the FAFSA application website was delayed from October to December, as the Department of Education acted like a student who turns in a midterm essay at the end of the semester, hoping for partial credit. Then, the “soft launch” of the new site wasn’t much better, with students only able to get online for a few hours each day and many reporting that their saved information was lost.
This week, the Department of Education acknowledged it had also sent incorrect tax data to many colleges due to a flaw in the new form’s design. Though the department promised to send the correct data eventually, it advised administrators to use their “professional judgment to decide on a case-by-case basis” whether to process a student’s financial aid application until they could get revised information. The errors could lead some colleges to delay notifying students of their aid packages, complicating seniors’ already tricky decisions this spring in choosing where to enroll.
The “simplified”…
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