Richard Cordray may not be the most recognizable name in the Biden administration, but in his capacity as chief operating officer of federal student aid, he has overseen one of the administration's biggest failures.
Under Mr. Cordray's watch, the U.S. Department of Education launched a new version of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. This application was supposed to be the beginning of a new era in which students would be able to more easily fill out financial aid applications and qualify for better aid packages.
Instead, this new FAFSA has been plagued by error after error, delay after delay, and failure after failure, all of which have prevented students and families from adequately preparing for college. and seriously impair their ability to make informed decisions about their future in higher education.
Cordray and the Department of Education's failure to properly roll out the new FAFSA application can be traced back to the early days of the Biden administration. At the time, the new administration was tasked with implementing the FAFSA Simplification Act, which was recently passed by Congress. December 2020.
The new law provides for the FAFSA Streamlined Application to open in time for the 2024-2025 school year, which the Biden administration, Department of Education, and Office of Federal Student Aid spent more than two years preparing for launch. It means something. This new online application will begin on October 1, 2023.
Cordray became COO of the Office of Federal Student Aid in May 2021, a full 29 months before the new FAFSA application was scheduled to begin. However, nearly two years later, in March 2023, the Department of Education announced that the regular release date for the FAFSA application would not be met and the release of new applications would be postponed indefinitely. This was the first major failure in his new FAFSA development.
It wasn't until November, a full eight months later, that the FSA office finally announced that applications would open by December 31st, pushing back the entire student financial aid timeline by a full three months.
The FAFSA rollout date is important for several reasons, but most importantly, it allows students to make informed decisions about where they want to attend college and to ensure that they receive their financial aid award packages in a timely manner. This is to create a schedule. Thanks to Cordray and the FSA's incompetence, it's in flux.
When applications for the next school year open as scheduled on October 1, the Department of Education will collect data from completed applications. Typically, after the first of the new year, departments begin sharing that data with students' selected institutions so that students can receive their financial aid letters by the end of March. This allows students to make final decisions about where to attend school in a timely manner and allows institutions to meet enrollment capacity for each entering class.
Instead, due to rollout delays, institutions did not begin receiving students' financial aid data until March, the month students were scheduled to receive scholarship notifications. But the department's failures did not end there.
When this application was first released, there were a lot of issues that took more than a week to resolve. Then, even after applications were finally stabilized, the department continued to announce numerous errors in the submission of student data, which in turn affected the value of financial aid packages available to hundreds of thousands of students. Ta.
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To this day, the FSA and the Department of Education continue to announce that they have fixed more glitches and failures in the new FAFSA, but students are still waiting for their financial aid letters while universities around the world I wonder if there will be enough scholarships available. This fall, classrooms will be filled with students. However, amidst this display of incompetence, accountability has not been fulfilled.
If Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona is interested in sending a message to students, families, and universities, he must force Richard Cordray to vacate his office, resolve the FAFSA mess, and restore confidence in this important office. A new COO should be installed at FSA to recover. In millions.
