By COLLIN BINKLEY (AP Education Writer)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Education Department announced that it found an error in the calculation of financial aid for hundreds of thousands of student applications sent to colleges this month. As a result, they will need to reprocess them, creating a setback for this year’s college applications.
A vendor working for the federal government made a mistake in calculating a financial aid formula for over 200,000 students, the department revealed on Friday. The information was originally sent to colleges to assist in preparing financial aid packages, but now it requires recalculation. This comes as the department is already dealing with a backlog of over 4 million other financial aid applications.
In a statement, the Education Department assured that the issue will not impact 1.3 million applications that were correctly processed and sent to colleges this month. They stated that the error has been rectified and will not affect future records.
This year, students applying for college have faced uncertainty as they await the Education Department’s revamp of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Known as FAFSA, this form is used to determine eligibility for federal Pell Grants, as well as for colleges and states to award their own financial aid to students.
The intended simplification of the form with an update took much longer than expected. This has resulted in colleges having less time to make financial aid offers to students, and students having less time to decide where to enroll.
“This mistake is another unnecessary error that is likely to cause further delays for students,” commented Justin Draeger, president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.
Given the numerous delays, he added, “every error adds up and will significantly impact students who are reliant on need-based financial aid to pursue their postsecondary aspirations.”
The latest misstep is related to the Student Aid Index, a new formula used to determine students’ financial need following the submission of the FAFSA application. In some cases, the department neglected to consider certain financial assets such as investments, savings and total cash, as per an agency memo sent to colleges on Friday.
As a result, students were assigned a lower Student Aid Index, indicating greater financial need than they actually have.
While the department addresses these students’ records, it is advising colleges to conduct their own calculations and formulate “a tentative aid package.”
Draeger opposed this, stating that colleges can only work with “accurate and valid data.”
“It is not practical or feasible to distribute incorrect FAFSA data and request thousands of schools to make real-time calculations and adjustments to the federal formula,” he noted.
Advocates are concerned that the disorder in this year’s process may discourage students from pursuing college, particularly those for whom financial considerations are crucial in their decision-making.
Senate Republicans are seeking a hearing with Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to address their “serious concerns” regarding the FAFSA rollout.
The well-known FAFSA form, which takes a lot of time to fill out, was supposed to be improved in 2020 by a bipartisan bill in Congress. The bill aimed to simplify the form, reducing the number of questions from 100 to less than 40, and also changing the way student aid is calculated, with the goal of expanding it to more low-income students.
However, the update has been marked by delays and technical problems.
Normally, the form is available to fill out in October, but the Education Department didn’t have it ready until late December. Even then, the agency wasn’t ready to start processing the forms and sending them to states and colleges, which only began this month.
During this time, the department has struggled to fix many bugs. In the beginning, the process didn't properly consider inflation. Another problem prevented parents without a Social Security number from filling out the form. This meant many U.S. citizen or permanent resident students whose parents didn't have a Social Security number couldn't apply.
The department says it has fixed those problems and is now hurrying to process millions of student applications and send them to colleges and states. The agency reports that it has processed 1.5 million applications out of about 6 million received so far.
The department's statement said it will keep processing a large amount of records in the next few weeks. The department is focused on helping students and families through the process and assisting colleges in providing aid offers as quickly as possible.
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