Students Called the Ed Department for FAFSA Help. Most Were Ignored.
The Department of Education was supposed to make applying for financial aid easier for college students. Instead, they released an unreliable, glitch-filled mess that launched millions of families into a bureaucratic nightmare.
This week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a 41-page report detailing the Department of Education’s failure to provide a functional Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form—a financial aid form required for any college student seeking federal loans or grants, as well as institutional financial aid at most colleges.
The 2021 Consolidated Appropriations Act required the Department of Education to update and streamline this form. The directive was a perfectly reasonable one: Who wouldn’t want to make a form that millions of students and their families fill out year after year to be easier to complete and understand?
The problem was that the Department of Education was clearly not up to the task. While the FAFSA is typically released on October 1, the form wasn’t made fully available until January 7 of this year, more than three months late. While the new form was much shorter than its predecessors, it quickly became clear that it was riddled with technical bugs.
Many parents and students had extreme difficulty completing the form. In all, the Department of Education found more than 40 technical errors in the form—ranging from an error preventing students born in 2000 from progressing in the form to one in which parents without Social Security numbers were un
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