Commentary: New FAFSA form for college aid falls short

“Better FAFSA” is not!

 

They threw away the baby with the bath water when they scrapped the now-old FAFSA for a brand-new form.

 

FAFSA stands for Free Application for Federal Student Aid and was established 40 years ago.

 

The formulas behind the form change every four years along party lines. The central processor was upgraded with such functionality as skip-logic so that the same question wouldn’t appear multiple times.

 

It wasn’t pretty, but it worked and worked correctly.

 

The push to reconstruct FAFSA was former Republican Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander’s chief objective. You may have seen his pictures strung along the paper FAFSA like a winter scarf. His final push for a simplified FAFSA was approved and granted as a parting gift by the U.S. Senate in November of 2019, prior to his retirement.

 

Once the Senate approved this amendment to the Higher Education Act of 1965, the mandate was enacted. In this case, the task landed on the U.S. Department of Education and its employees. The task was postponed for several years.

 

Finally, the 2024-25 FAFSA was supposed to open on Oct. 1, 2023. Then it was postponed to January 2024.

 

Even then, the site, studentaid.gov/h/apply-for-aid/fafsa, crashed or was unavailable.

 

Many families couldn’t submit it. Those that did found that their FAFSA was left “in process” for months.

 

Colleges typically receive FAFSAs a few days after a family files. It wasn’t until late March 2024 that colleges began to receive some FAFSAs. But the saga didn’t end there. The results were incorrect. The formulas behind the form were incorrect. It turns out that in as many as 20% of cases, the Student Aid Index is incorrect.

 

This index represents an amount that families are expected to pay out of their own resources.

 

Based on this amount, families may be eligible to receive federal grants and/or loans.

 

These delays and incorrect outputs will affect those families who really need federal aid to pay for college, as well as those whose children attend high-cost universities.

 

Stay tuned for another article about how the formulas behind the form have changed and how families can appeal.

 

C. Claire Law is a M.S. IECA Certified Educational Planner and has resided on Daniel Island since 2004. For more information on the FAFSA Simplification Act, go to studentaid.gov/help-center/answers/article/fafsa-simplification-act, and to learn how financial aid is calculated , go to studentaid.gov/complete-aid-process/how-calculated.