Many students who planned on using federal student aid like Pell Grants and student loans to attend college this year faced an unexpected obstacle: the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). The FAFSA had long been criticized for being too long and complicated, so in December 2020, Congress passed the FAFSA Simplification Act. The new simplified FAFSA was supposed to streamline the process, but a botched rollout had the opposite effect. While the consequences of this failure have been impossible to hide, the Department of Education (ED) has been trying to conceal what went wrong. But thanks to dogged efforts from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and the Government Accountability Office (GAO), we are starting to get a clear picture of what happened. The latest details come from Tuesday’s hearing featuring GAO staff. The most important points to emerge from the hearing and their prepared testimony include the following:
The Department of Education is Stonewalling the Investigation
The Director of the GAO’s office that handles education testified that the ED’s lack of cooperation was “uniquely challenging.” The committee chairman noted that it required Congressional subpoenas to induce the limited cooperation we’ve seen from the ED. Why would the ED be so resistant to cooperating with the GAO investigation? The best-case scenario is that they are too busy trying to fix the mess they created. The worst case is that they are trying to hide the reasons for the botched rollout.
Students Were Harmed and Left in the Dark
The biggest problems have been for students. GAO noted that “Education did not consistently provide students with timely information about (1) the status of delays in processing their applications, (2) changes in their eligibility for federal student aid, or (3) solutions to technical barriers they encountered during the application process.” For example, initially, students born in 2000 simply could not submit the form. Rather than letting applicants born that year know about the issue and when it was resolved, those students had to check back in for months, hoping the problem had been resolved.
The lack of guidance for students was breathtaking. Four million calls to the FAFSA help center, 74 percent of all calls, went unanswered. And, “Education also did not regularly provide applicants who encountered one of more than 40 known technical issues affecting the FAFSA process with timely information on available solutions.”
When ED fixed calculation errors that could affect a student’s eligibility for aid, they did not inform the student of the change. Some students who submitted a paper FAFSA had to wait seven months to hear back about their application.
This frustrating process no doubt contributed to the nine percent fall in applications.
Colleges Were Left Hanging
GAO noted, “Education consistently failed to meet promised deadlines and provide colleges with sufficient notice of changes to timeframes throughout the rollout of the current FAFSA cycle.” ED usually sends colleges FAFSA information for their applicants in January, yet delayed doing so until March.
And the information they did send was often riddled with errors. The most efficient way of correcting these issues—batch processing—was continually delayed and eventually abandoned.
There are Still Many Unresolved Problems
Shockingly, almost a full year after the new FAFSA should have been ready, there are still unresolved problems with the form. GAO documented that there are “over 20 technical issues still unresolved as of August 2024,” seven of which are classified as “critical” flaws. For example, some parents with foreign addresses cannot access the form, some can’t continue past the first section of the form, and graduate students continue to be erroneously told that they are eligible for Pell Grants.
A Bad Contract
The contractor that developed the new FAFSA has already been paid $31 million, with extension options that could increase that to $142 million over the next decade. They failed catastrophically.
ED used a fixed-price contract instead of paying the contractor as requirements were met. Thus, the contractor was paid in full even though 18 of the 25 key contract requirements were not completed.
ED also failed to follow best practices for testing and double-checking the FAFSA before launch. On testing, 26 out of 48 testing readiness indicators were not completed, yet ED moved forward anyway, “increasing the risk that testing would not identify” problems with the FAFSA “prior to deployment.”
ED also didn’t correctly implement independent verification and validation, which “involves having a knowledgeable party who is independent of the developer determine that the system or product meets the users’ needs and fulfills its intended purpose.” Instead of using an independent vendor, a developer’s subcontractor was assigned this task, defeating the purpose of having an independent observer evaluate the project.
Why Did ED Botch the FAFSA Rollout?
We know that ED failed. But we still don’t know why. Occam’s razor hints that ED devoted their time and attention to other tasks, such as the illegal student loan forgiveness plans pushed by the administration. We don’t yet have a smoking gun documenting that was the case, but nothing in these GAO reports goes against that explanation. One way to determine if that is the case is to evaluate who was involved in resolving the problems with the FAFSA and then look at what they were doing from 2021 to 2023. My hunch is that we’ll find that key staff were diverted from FAFSA to focus on student loan forgiveness. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but that is looking less and less likely, given Occam’s razor and stonewalling by ED.
Image by Karen Roach — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 585769847
