Biden team asserts Fafsa fixed, but damage looks done

The Biden administration said it has largely fixed computer problems that produced major delays in essential financial aid processes, but not before they have apparently discouraged millions of students and handed Republicans a valuable election-year example of Democratic incompetence.

The troubles involved the government’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (Fafsa) questionnaire, which students routinely complete as part of their college application process to help institutions understand family wealth for various purposes including loan and aid allocations.

Politicians have long promised to simplify the Fafsa, concerned that its tedious length – more than 100 questions – had been discouraging students, especially those of minority and disadvantaged backgrounds, from applying to college. The Biden administration took on that challenge. It reduced the number of questions by about two-thirds but then mishandled the transition to the point where the Fafsa was not ready for the current round of applications for the coming academic year.

Institutions around the US extended their admissions processes to await solutions that would deliver them the student information collected by the Fafsa. But the damage, at least for the 2024-25 entering class, may have been done: the Department of Education has tallied less than half of the 17 million Fafsa applications it normally receives by this time of year.

In a briefing with reporters, the US undersecretary of education, James Kvaal, appealed for students to complete their Fafsa applications. “After the progress we’ve made in recent weeks, we are now processing Fafsa forms quickly and accurately, and many schools are sending out financial aid offers,” he said.

But congressional Republicans – with their basic criticisms endorsed by some higher education leaders – have been taking the opportunity to hammer away at the Biden administration.

While Mr Kvaal and other department officials announced the restoration of the Fafsa system’s functionality, the US secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, endured condemnations during a previously scheduled hearing on the department’s annual budget request. The computer problems were “simply inexcusable and inexplicable”, Susan Collins, a Republican senator from Maine, told the secretary during the session of the US Senate’s Committee on Appropriations.

On the House side of Capitol Hill, where Republicans are in control, the chair of the chamber’s education committee, Virginia Foxx, said she wanted Dr Cardona to appear next week for a hearing on various topics, including the “botched” Fafsa roll-out and the continuing pro-Palestinian protests on dozens of US university campuses.

Her demand came a few days after the Department of Education announced that its top official in charge of Fafsa, Richard Cordray, the chief operating officer for the department’s Federal Student Aid Office since early in the Biden administration, would step down this summer.

The central lobby group for US higher education, the American Council on Education, which typically avoids direct criticism of officials, said it understood the reasons for Mr Cordray’s departure.

Dr Cardona nevertheless tried to argue that in the end, the Fafsa overhaul will end up helping students. He told the Senate committee that policymakers had grown too comfortable over the years with the idea that only about two-thirds of students attempting the Fafsa regularly completed it. As the new version becomes standard, he said, that share should rise to 90 per cent or more.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com