Dive Brief:
- The U.S. Department of Education will automatically reprocess between 15% and 20% of the applications for federal financial aid submitted thus far, following widespread tax data miscalculations.
- The announcement reverses the department’s original plan to only reprocess the Free Application for Federal Student Aid forms that contained errors decreasing the amount of aid students were entitled to.
- Earlier this week, the department said it would reprocess the forms that approved students for too much aid if asked by colleges. The change in plan stemmed from college and stakeholder feedback, an agency spokesperson said Friday.
Dive Insight:
The new FAFSA is intended to simplify the financial aid process for students and their families, lowering the maximum number of questions from over 100 to several dozen. But the Education Department published the updated form three months later than usual, and its rollout has since been riddled with errors and glitches.
The shortened timeline and further delays have had ripple effects because colleges and states often rely on FAFSA data when disbursing aid. In turn, students have had less time to compare financial aid offers and decide where to attend. Many colleges have postponed their commitment and financial aid deadlines for the 2024-25 academic year to help address this issue.
More than 6.9 million FAFSA forms were submitted as of Friday, the Education Department said. It said less than 20% of “previously submitted” forms will need to be reprocessed, though it did not provide an exact figure.
The Education Department will begin automatically reprocessing the applications affected by the latest error in the first half of April.
“We recognize how important it is for schools to have the information they need to make aid offers to students, which is why we are reprocessing all affected records at the request of schools,” a department spokesperson said Friday.
To expedite the financial aid process, colleges can make offers using either the original or reprocessed student records — known as Institutional Student Information Records, or ISIRs — according to Richard Cordray, chief operating officer of Federal Student Aid.
“We encourage schools that choose to move forward with the original ISIR to start packaging aid offers as quickly as possible,” Cordray said in a statement Thursday.
The department published an open-source tool to allow colleges to see which of their student financial aid records have been affected by the tax error.
In its Thursday announcement, the Education Department also said it had resolved the last issue preventing students whose parents do not have Social Security numbers from submitting the FAFSA online. The issue, which disproportionately hurt immigrant families, had forced those students to complete the FAFSA using the updated paper form.