Plan to simplify college aid instead made it worse

WASHINGTON — There were just days left to process a batch of federal financial aid applications when Education Department officials made a fateful discovery: 70,000 emails from students all over the country, containing reams of essential data.

They were sitting in an inbox, untouched.

That discovery last week started a panicked, three-day crash effort by more than 200 of the department’s employees, including Richard Cordray, the nation’s top student aid official, to read through each of the emails one by one and extract crucial identifying information required for financial aid. The students’ futures depended on it.

“It needs to get untangled,” Cordray told his staff members Thursday, according to recordings of two back-to-back meetings that The New York Times obtained. “So, you know, I’m getting pretty impatient.”

An exasperated staff member shot back, “We worked all night long — literally — all night.”

It was another setback in the botched rollout of a new version of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as FAFSA, that millions of families and thousands of schools rely on to determine how students will pay for college. Three years ago, Congress ordered the Education Department to revamp the new form to make it easier and more accessible. It has been anything but.

For nearly six months, students and schools navigated a bureaucratic mess caused by severe delays in launching the website and processing critical information. A series of blunders by the department — from a haphazard rollout to technical meltdowns — have left students and schools in limbo and plunged the most critical stage of the college admissions season into disarray.

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In a normal year, students would be sorting through their financial aid offers by now, giving them plenty of time to prepare for the traditional decision day May 1, when many schools expect commitments.

But this is not a normal year.

Because of the delays in the FAFSA rollout, schools do not have the information they need from the government to assemble financial aid offers. Students have had to postpone decisions about where to attend college because they have no idea how much aid they will receive.

Many schools are pushing back their enrollment deadlines to give students more time to figure out their finances, throwing college budgets and waitlists into chaos.

The Education Department has promised to meet a self-imposed deadline of Friday to start sending students’ financial information to schools. A Biden administration official, who asked for anonymity to discuss details of the process, said the department had begun sending out “small batches” of data over the weekend.

But the task ahead is monumental. The department is working with 5 million applications that are in so far, but more than 10 million additional ones are expected to roll in as students make their way through the process, which is still not functioning without delays.

“Financial aid offices across the country are hanging on by their fingernails at this point,” said Justin Draeger, CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

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