As Miguel A. Cardona, the education secretary, appeared before lawmakers Wednesday to make a case for funding his agency next year, members of both parties had something else on their minds: this year’s chaotic college admissions process.
Republicans peppered him with questions about the ill-fated new Free Application for Federal Student Aid form, which has derailed college admissions this year. Several of them questioned whether the agency had diverted resources away from the project in its pursuit of canceling student debt.
“There is nothing more important right now in the Department of Education,” Mr. Cardona told the House Appropriations Committee about the aid form, saying the agency was successfully tackling multiple priorities with the resources available. “We’re working on it around the clock.”
While Mr. Cardona testified, the House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development held a separate hearing, where lawmakers from both parties said problems with the aid form had hurt prospective students.
“This is not just a little list of grievances,” Justin Dreger, executive director of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, told lawmakers. “This really adds a credibility crisis for the Department of Education.”
Mr. Draeger said the schools his organization worked with had encountered two additional issues affecting the department’s calculations, which have rendered 40 percent of the financial records the schools have received so far useless.
Since the department began using the new form in late December, errors and design flaws have repeatedly hampered the processing of financial information used to calculate federal aid, which the agency ultimately delivers to colleges and universities.
As a result, college administrators have been unable to tell many students how much they can expect to pay. Many schools have delayed their application deadlines to give students time to make decisions about where to attend college based on what they can afford.
Rachelle Feldman, a vice chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, testified Wednesday that her school had not yet sent a formal aid offer to accepted students — offers that normally would have been sent with acceptance letters by the end of March .
She said her school now hoped to send offers of aid to students by the first week of May at the earliest, well after the date when many students would have already enrolled in other years.
Since April, the Department of Education has maintained a “quick news” page, with regular updates on its progress in troubleshooting the FAFSA form. An update posted Wednesday said the department planned to re-process many of the faulty records sent to schools by May 1.
An Education Department spokesman said officials believed they had corrected most of the major errors on the form and that department staff were processing submitted applications within one to three days, a timeline that Mr. Cardona also presented to lawmakers on Wednesday. .
But the reaction from Congress has revealed the shaky ground Mr. Cardona is on this spring, as many of the department’s goals have been overshadowed.
Mr. Cardona said Wednesday that despite problems with the form this year, the new, simplified version would make the aid application process easier for students to move forward.
Even in typical years, many students eligible for aid do not apply for aid, and several Democrats have expressed concern that unexpected roadblocks this year would disproportionately affect low-income and first-generation students who may have been turned away because of form flaws , or they may have concluded that taking out loans was their only option to pay for college.
“The data portends a catastrophic decline in college enrollment this fall for the high school class of 2024 unless something changes very quickly,” testified Kim Cook, executive director of the National College Attainment Network.
