A new review and testimony from investigators with the U.S. Government Accountability Office offer the clearest picture yet of the aid form’s troubled rollout.
New investigations by the U.S. Government Accountability Office offer the fullest picture yet of why the revamped FAFSA had such a troubled launch.There’s no question, the rollout of the revamped FAFSA – the Free Application for Federal Student Aid that millions of students must fill out to qualify for college loans and grants – was a slow-motion explosion of
Ultimately, this led to an array of mistakes, from minor to critical, that weren’t addressed – or even caught – until students ran headlong into them. Among those mistakes:All applicants born in the year 2000 were initially and mysteriously blocked from completing the form, a problem that took 69 days to fix. According to the GAO, these year-2000 applicants weren’t warned of the problem, nor were they told when it was fixed. Many simply kept trying and failing to submit their application.
The GAO review suggests the department bears considerable blame for its short-staffed call center: It vastly underestimated how many people would ask for help during the rollout period. The 3.5 million applicants who navigated the form’s initial rollout heard nothing from the department until Feb. 20, 2024 – more than seven weeks after the form launched – and that was simply to tell them that their forms had not yet been processed.
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