The long-awaited Simplified FAFSA form, delayed three months from when students and parents traditionally receive it, made its official launch on New Year’s Eve. However, glitches, crashes, and extremely limited available windows to use the website have caused some experts to claim the Department of Education missed the deadline and advise families to wait up to another month before trying again.
The Department implemented a “soft launch” of the form on its website last week, but its headaches have bled past its official launch date and into the new year, and it’s yet unclear how long they will last. While Federal Student Aid conceded the form has experienced “minor” issues, NASFAA President Justin Draeger said this is a challenging time “[e]ven by soft launch standards.”
“Frustration will likely continue because even if students fill out the FAFSA today, we still don’t have an exact date of when schools will receive FAFSA applicant data, so financial aid administrators can begin building and communicating financial aid package,” said Draeger in a statement yesterday.
Without a fully operational FAFSA portal, schools lack a concrete timeline for when they could provide financial aid offers to their students. This only exacerbates the pains experts have already expressed about the new form prior to its most recent rut. While the simplified FAFSA form promised to cut down the number of questions posed to families and streamline the financial aid process, some worried how the short turnaround time to process forms could disproportionately hurt students of color and overwhelm financial aid offices.
Most recent correspondence by FSA states that form processing will begin in late January and that there is no need to rush to fill out the form immediately during the soft launch period. However, Robert Heil, CEO of Financial Aid Services, believes students’ and officers’ anxiety is very well founded.
“The data may be available hopefully in a few weeks, but everyone is already operating on such a compressed schedule,” he says. “Whether you’re a student, parent or university administrator, this uncertainty just keeps lingering.”
Heil adds that these headache delays will significantly affect colleges’ and universities’ yield seasons, the period when students select to enroll at a particular institution.
“Campuses that are better prepared, they’re going to have an advantage when it comes to recruiting and retaining their students,” he says. “For campuses feeling less prepared, it could mean a rocky spring and summer months.”
One institution that took a proactive step in light of the FAFSA delay was Assumption University, which launched its own financial aid form in October and closed it upon the December FAFSA launch. Four hundred of its admitted students completed the form, and so far, Assumption’s submitted applications are running 28% ahead of last year and on pace to break a school record, says William Boffi, Vice President for Enrollment Management.
“I don’t know if there is direct causation between our FAFSA play and increased applications, but I am happy we took the leap to provide a resource for our families,” he says. “We are certainly generating positive momentum, and I am confident it is because of our institutional commitment to students and families.”
The Department of Education urges deferring FAFSA completion events later this month and February and to look out for further soft launch delays. Detailed school-level data on FAFSA completions will not be available until April 2024.
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