Since 2020, when Congress ordered a simplification of the federal financial aid system, the U.S. Department of Education has faced the complex task of actually making changes to the ever-important formula for determining who gets what.
Grants and loans depend on the inputs and outputs of the dreaded FAFSA form, which is usually available on October 1st. The new form was supposed to debut in 2023, but the department struggled last October, through November and December.
The government has promised to open the digital doors by the end of December. My oldest child will be going to college this fall, so I spent Sunday afternoon and evening trying to access the website and fill out the form.
Completion proved elusive. Here’s what happened.
I started around 2pm. and the FAFSA website (short for Free Application for Federal Student Aid) greeted me ominously: “The FAFSA form is available periodically while we monitor the site’s performance and update the form to give you a better experience.”
It was not available then, nor at 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7 pm. I started documenting my search in Threads.
Coincidentally (or not), I received an email out of the blue at 6pm from Johanny Adames, a department press secretary, preemptively declaring our communication off the record. (This is a negotiation, not a dictate, in my journalism rulebook.)
But the message simply led me to a public announcement from the department, which noted that the promised FAFSA availability in December was actually a “soft launch” where the form would be available for “periods of time over the next several days.” However, the statement included the following: “Students and families will be able to complete and submit the 2024-25 FAFSA online until December 31.”
It seemed like a promise, or at least a dare, so I continued. At 8pm, a Threads user named “jkvaal” started following me. Was it James Kvaal, the undersecretary at the Department of Education who oversees higher education? I wasn’t trying to ruin anyone’s night, except maybe mine. (My family was elsewhere until later and my 18 year old was helping me remotely.)
Then, also at 8pm, success! The website opened and I was able to answer several questions in the Personal Circumstances section, which is the first of five sections that together could contain just 18 questions, down from 100 or more in previous versions of the form.
The website design was clean. The user interface was quite friendly. But things were not always clear. At one point, the site was telling me that both my daughter and I had already started forms when in fact neither of us had, at least as far as I could tell.
Eventually, I moved on, but not very far. There was no way for my daughter’s login to send me the email that would allow me to give the IRS permission to enter income data on the form. Well, there was a way, but the email button didn’t work.
Did the form save our data? It should, but I couldn’t be sure. There was an indication that the Social Security Administration was looking at her earnings history file, so that’s nothing. Once I logged out and tried to log back in to fix the email-your-father problem, the whole site was down again.
In a statement on Monday, the Ministry of Education said: “The form was open to the public for short windows during which thousands of people successfully completed their application while we monitored performance in real time.
“Incorporating real-time learning and pauses is best practice, especially for a new site that needs to provide transitions for many different people’s situations and involves updating dozens of systems, some of which haven’t been updated in nearly 50 years. “, the department added.
It wasn’t necessary for me — or anyone — to try to fill out the form once the site became available. If you need to fill out a FAFSA this year, the department won’t even send your information to colleges until “later in January.” That said, college financial aid administrators would certainly like to have the information as soon as possible.
The department is facing a huge task here. I have every sympathy for the government employees who have to upgrade a website that will probably be used by more than 15 million people in the coming months. The department staff probably worked on Christmas and their hats.
That said, I wish they had waited another year and made it to the end of the summer so that everyone would have a full academic year cycle to get used to the new format and formulas for determining aid. It’s too late for that, unfortunately, so I’ll keep pursuing this thing as if it were Ticketmaster and Beyoncé tickets were on the line. Fortunately, federal student loan funds aren’t running out, let alone so fast that stadium seats are disappearing.
