Hold on to yourself. Once again, it's the season for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
If you had clients who were faced with the 2024-2025 FAFSA, which is the federal financial aid application that millions of families fill out each year, you would know what a complete controversy it was.
Among the problems plaguing the last FAFSA cycle were:
- More than two months late in starting FAFSA.
- Sadly, insufficient customer service call centers to field millions of calls from frustrated applicants.
- Dozens of software bugs that made it extremely difficult for many parents to complete the application.
- A final reduction in the number of first-time FAFSA filers who were too intimidated to tackle the application or gave up trying.
- A chaotic disruption of the admissions process for the nation's colleges and universities.
As U.S. Department of Education officials scramble to reassure families, colleges and Capitol Hill that things will be different for 2025-2026, understandable skepticism remains.
The first sign that something was amiss came in August when the DOE announced that the submission of the FAFSA would be delayed for the second year in a row.
Traditionally, the FAFSA due date is October 1st, which is especially helpful for students who will be applying early decision or early action to schools. Schools want to be able to process these student aid applications before collecting aid packages.
Last year, the FAFSA wasn't released until late December after it said it would be available sometime that month. However, even when it was released, only a small fraction of families could successfully access it, and completion numbers dropped dramatically for months afterward.
This time, the presentation date is scheduled for December 1. We will see if this date is true.
One reason for hope this year is that the DOE has added significantly more people to the FAFSA call center. The GAO's recent findings on the FAFSA debacle showed that 74% of the 5.4 million calls made to the FAFSA call center went unanswered last season. Inexplicably, GAO auditors noted that the number of people answering the FAFSA phones was actually lower than the year before, even though the FAFSA had undergone a dramatic number of changes.
If your clients are having trouble with the latest FAFSA, the Federal Student Aid number is (800) 433-3243. If you visit the FSA website, you can also ask for help via a live chat.
The GAO audit also found that more than 40 technical issues prevented the initial submission of the FAFSA form. These included issues that blocked some students from completing the application—or, in some cases, prevented them from starting it. Other issues include erasing applicants' information entered on the form, providing incorrect error messages and providing inaccurate assessments of students' eligibility for federal aid.
Another area of focus was leadership within the student aid bureaucracy. The department experienced a great deal of turnover, including the position of director of information in the student aid office. Since 2021, the position has changed five times, and the role still does not have a permanent person.
Last year's problems caused some students' Student Aid Index, which is generated from information families provide on the FAFSA, as well as automatically through the Internal Revenue Service, to produce incorrect results. This led some families to mistakenly assume they would be eligible for more financial aid, while others were led to believe otherwise.
If you're not familiar with the term, the Student Aid Index (SAI) has replaced the Expected Family Contribution (EFC). The SAI and its predecessor the EFC represent what the financial aid formula has determined a family must be able to pay for, at least, for one year of college.
One way to double-check a FAFSA-generated SAI is to use the Federal Student Aid Evaluator before the FAFSA is available. This calculator estimates a student's federal aid and generates a preliminary SAI.
If the SAIs generated by the FAFSA and the evaluator differ by more than a small amount, it is worth investigating. The FAFSA software may have produced the wrong SAI. Otherwise, your customer may have caused that discrepancy by entering the wrong digits with either method.
At a congressional hearing in September, members of the US House of Representatives on both sides of the aisle, as well as GAO officials who testified, expressed skepticism about the problems being fixed for the new FAFSA season.
What's ironic about what's happened over the past year is that a major goal of Congress when it passed legislation to simplify the FAFSA was to encourage more students to apply for aid. However, as the GAO noted, “Rather than simplifying access to student financial aid—one of the department's strategic goals—FAFSA's expansion created barriers for some students and their families.”
Lynn O'Shaughnessy, a nationally recognized expert, offers an online course – Savvy College Planning – exclusively for financial advisors. Click here to get Lynn's guide, Finding the Most Generous Colleges.