With just days left to process a series of federal financial aid applications, Department of Education officials made a fateful discovery. It was his 70,000 emails from students across the country that contained tons of important data.
They just sat there in my inbox.
The discovery last week set off a panicked three-day raid by more than 200 department officials, including Richard Cordray, the nation's top student support authority, who read each email one by one to find out what was needed. Extracted important identifying information. Financial aid. The future of the students depended on it.
“We need to untangle this,” Mr. Cordray told his staff Thursday, according to records of two consecutive meetings obtained by The New York Times. “So, you know, I'm getting pretty impatient.”
An exasperated staff member retorted: “We worked all night, literally all night.”
This follows the rollout of a new version of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as the FAFSA, which millions of families and thousands of schools rely on to determine how to pay for their students' college costs. It was another setback in failure. Three years ago, Congress ordered the Department of Education to revamp the new forms to make them easier and more accessible. That was never the case.
For nearly six months, students and schools have been navigating bureaucratic confusion caused by significant delays in launching websites and processing critical information. A series of missteps by the department, from haphazard rollouts to technical meltdowns, have left students and schools in limbo and thrown the most critical phase of the college admissions season into disarray.
“I'm clinging to you with my nails.”
In a normal year, students would have sorted out their scholarship offers by now, giving them plenty of time to prepare for May 1, the traditional decision date when many schools expect commitments. It should have been.
However, this year is not a normal year.
Due to delays in the FAFSA rollout, schools are not getting the information they need from the government to put together financial aid offers. Students are being forced to postpone decisions about which university to attend because they don't know how much aid they will receive.
Many schools are pushing back admissions deadlines to give students more time to assess their finances, throwing college budgets and waiting lists into disarray.
The Department of Education has committed to meeting a voluntary deadline of Friday to start sending students' financial information to schools. A Biden administration official, who requested anonymity to discuss details of the process, said the department began sending “small amounts” of data over the weekend.
However, the challenges ahead are enormous. The department is working through the 5.7 million applications submitted to date, but the process is still slow with more than 10 million more expected to be submitted as students progress through the process. It is not working.
“Financial aid offices across the country are trying their hardest at this time,” said Justin Drager, chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.
broken system
The goal of the revamped FAFSA system was to simplify the notoriously confusing form and make it more accessible to low-income students by reducing over 100 questions to fewer than 40 questions.
But it wasn't ready for implementation in October, when the FAFSA form is typically available for students to submit their family's financial details to the government.
When the system finally went live in late December, problems quickly became apparent.
A technical glitch has left many students unable to access forms on the website. Students reported being repeatedly kicked out or locked out of forms, or being hung up on after waiting 30 minutes to three hours for someone to answer the department's help line.
The failed rollout undermined a key feature of the federal student aid process.
The government requires FAFSA information to calculate the amount of federal aid a student should receive. Schools then need that number to independently calculate how much a student can expect to pay at that particular university, after adding up tuition and additional scholarships.
For many students, the FAFSA estimate, sometimes received before they hear back from the schools they applied to, is the first sign of hope that they will be able to attend college.
Students at a loss
Andrea, a senior at KIPP Denver High School in Colorado, will be the first in her family to attend college. She has her heart set on Duke University.
But first, she has to navigate the FAFSA.
“It's tough,” said Andrea, 17, who immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico and asked to be identified to protect her parents, who are in the U.S. illegally. “It's deeper than form. It's our future.”
Her case collided with perhaps the most pernicious flaw in the development. The new form froze applicants who could not provide their own or their parent or caregiver's Social Security number, something that was not an issue with the old form.
To approve students who lack social security data, the Department of Education requires applicants like Andrea to submit a photo of their driver's license, ID card, or other proof of identity via email. I asked. As the department prepared to announce last week that the Social Security number issue had been resolved, officials discovered that the inbox and its 70,000 emails remained untouched.
As a result, Cordray assembled an emergency team of volunteers to work overtime to clear the backlog.
Students were counting on them, he said.
“We have a lot of Dreamers, new immigrants, people who could make their own way in this country if they were able to participate in the higher education process,” Cordray said. “We want them to be able to do that.”
Previous FAFSA forms were long and complicated, but upperclassmen at Andrea's school were able to fill out the form each year without any major problems. KIPP Colorado is part of a network of public charter schools with the highest college acceptance rates for low-income students in the country and hosts an annual His FAFSA Night where families gather to fill out forms. .
This year, only about 20 percent of students were able to fill out the form on FAFSA night. This is a big change from previous years, school officials said.
Karen Chavez, vice provost for college and career at KIPP Colorado, said she typically tries to assure students that college is on the horizon.
But she's been wrestling with that message this year.
“It's hard for us as counselors to have to monitor what I say and how I say things, because I want to protect their hearts and meet their expectations.” she said.
Who is to blame?
The Comptroller's Office opened an investigation into the FAFSA rollout at the request of Republicans, who say it put other priorities on the back burner, including President Biden's student loan debt forgiveness program.
Several White House and Education Department officials have cited unreasonably short schedules, overdue contractors and inadequate funding. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the issue openly, said other important tasks, such as restarting federal loan payments and reopening schools after the coronavirus pandemic, have drained critical resources. Admitted.
“It's not like anyone here didn't understand how important this project was, how big this project was,” said Department of Education Undersecretary James Kvar. “And that has been a top priority for us at the highest levels of the department for a year and a half now.”
There were obvious mistakes, including a lack of the robust user testing needed to uncover dozens of potentially serious technical issues. And it wasn't until November that the Education Department realized it hadn't adjusted a key revenue formula that would have denied more than $1 billion in aid to students.
Although the ministry has tried to project optimism about its progress, officials have quietly had doubts.
On February 13, Education Secretary Miguel A. Cardona told reporters that once technical issues are cleared, the FAFSA is a “15-minute process” and a “substantive victory” for students and schools. He said it would be.
A person familiar with the remarks said that at a staff meeting a week later, Cordray gave a different assessment, calling it “really terrible.'' “It could get much worse.”
In response to a request for comment for this article, Cordray said the Department of Education is focused on providing an updated and streamlined FAFSA.
“Our team is not focused on pointing fingers, but on delivering more federal student aid to eligible students and families,” he said.
stakes
There is growing concern that FAFSA issues will disproportionately impact traditionally underserved communities, particularly Black, Latino, first-generation, and low-income students. There is.
For many of them, the biggest factor in their college decision is how they will pay for tuition.
Student advocates worry that many students will simply give up, skipping university or relying on expensive loans.
“The stakes in stocks are huge,” said Kim Cook, chief executive of the National College Admissions Network. “The later the letter gets, the more the conversation turns to where it's going or if it's going.”
This month, the Education Department began deploying so-called concierge workers across the country to provide technical assistance to universities struggling with delays, with $50 million from the department's budget.
But as of last week, officials had only met with 20 of the 180 schools that requested additional assistance, according to a senior ministry official.
Rodriguez Murray, senior vice president of public policy and government affairs at the United Negro College Foundation, said the impact of FAFSA delays is similar to the impact the FAFSA delay had on historically black colleges and universities when the government made it harder for them to gain admission in 2011. He said it could be comparable to the devastation experienced. A service for parents to take out loans to cover their children's education expenses. Enrollment at HBCUs plummeted by 40,000 students in one year as the flow of aid ceased.
“It's a crisis that seems unnecessary, but one that we still hope can be avoided,” Murray said of the FAFSA aftermath.
