Education experts testified before the House on Wednesday about the continuing failures of the Biden administration’s botched rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
Reps. Burgess Owens (R-UT) and Frederica Wilson (D-FL) convened a hearing of the Higher Education and Workforce Development subcommittee titled “FAFSA Fail: Examining the Impact on Students, Families, and Schools” to discuss the chaos created by the Department of Education’s debacle.
“We are in an awful place today,” Justin Draeger, president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, told the committee. “When you have a crisis of credibility issue, schools don’t trust that more errors won’t be found, that guidance won’t change tomorrow, or that the data they have is correct.”
After months of delays, the Department of Education only recently started sending financial aid data to schools, a step that was necessary to allow the schools to produce offers for prospective students. The standard deadline for accepting an offer from a school for students is fast approaching on May 1, but many schools have yet to extend financial aid possibilities to students.
As a result, many families are in a situation where they have an acceptance letter from a school but are unsure if they will be able to afford accepting the offer because they have no idea what kind of financial aid they might be eligible for.
That is because, Draeger explained, much of the data schools have received from the Department of Education is “riddled with errors.” He said 20% of the data has errors and another 20% does not include the numbers needed to calculate awards, meaning “40% of the FAFSA files that schools have are not usable to calculate financial aid offers for students. And that’s on average, some schools are higher.”
“Schools are trying to figure out what to do: Not because [the Education Department] is purposefully misleading anyone, but because ED itself may not know where all of the issues lie,” he added.
Rachelle Feldman, vice provost of enrollment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told the committee on Wednesday that UNC has not extended any financial aid offers to students and quipped that the Department of Education has been coloring its communications with “sunshine and rainbows” while not providing solutions.
Feldman added that the most highly affected cohort of students is those from lower-income families, anecdotally telling the committee, “I worry most honestly about a student in, say, rural North Carolina who’s heard all their life that college is out of their reach. They have worked hard for 12 years, but all the voices around them are saying they can’t afford it — and we can’t get them the document that proves they can.”
According to the National College Attainment Network, completed FAFSA forms have dropped 40% this academic year, and only 27% of high school seniors have completed the form. NCAN CEO Kim Cook testified before the committee that those numbers are on average, and lower-income students lag behind their “better resourced peers” when completing the FAFSA forms.
Of the roughly 7 million applications submitted this cycle, around 16% will need corrections from students or families before the Education Department can process them, according to a Tuesday update from the department. That update estimates that 30% of the FAFSA forms are affected by processing or data errors.
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“It is unfathomable to me that the Office of Federal Student Aid received over $2 billion dollars last year,” Owens, the subcommittee chair, said. “So, in essence the American taxpayer has paid two billion to give their children a year or more of chaos and anxiety. FAFSA was created in 1992 with the HEA Reauthorization Act. We’ve had 32 years of a functioning system that served hundreds of millions of students and thousands of institutions. Within three years, Biden’s Department of Education has managed to bring the Education industry a possible game-changing crisis.”
When asked about what can be done, and whether some personnel at the Education Department should be fired, Draeger said he agreed with the committee’s request for a Government Accountability Office investigation, adding, “If there was a financial aid director or college president who delayed financial aid for six months on their campus, the professional price that would be paid would be pretty steep.”