The Swarthmore College campus in Swarthmore, Pa., on April 18, 2024. The Education Department announced on Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024, that availability of the federal student aid application form would be delayed for a second year in a row, after months of last-ditch troubleshooting and contingency planning failed to fully fix significant problems with last year’s revised application. (Caroline Gutman/The New York Times)
Availability of the federal student aid application form will be delayed for a second year in a row, after months of last-ditch troubleshooting and contingency planning failed to fully fix significant problems with last year’s revised application, the Education Department has announced.
Instead, the form, known as the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, will go live in October for “testing with a limited set of students and institutions” to iron out issues before launching fully Dec. 1 for the 2025-26 academic year, the department said Aug 7. The form is traditionally available Oct. 1.
The FAFSA form has been the source of continuing dread for officials, students and college administrators since the department introduced a shortened and redesigned version last year that was intended to streamline the application process.
Far from becoming easier, however, the process has been plagued by a steady stream of bugs and data entry issues that locked students out, returned inaccurate aid calculations and severely tied up the enrollment process that plays out in the spring.
The new delay mirrored last year’s problematic launch, when initial delays in October foreshadowed much deeper problems that affected the form for months after it became fully available.
As recently as July, the department was still running into problems with 2024-25 applications.
On July 30, the department notified schools that they could not send back forms that needed corrections — to reflect unexpected changes in a family’s income, for example — in batches, forcing them to return revised forms one by one.
“The fact that we are still, to this day, dealing with the aftershocks of this year’s FAFSA rollout shows just how imperative it is that the process is thoroughly tested from end to end and launched as a system, not in a piecemeal manner,” Beth Maglione, interim president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said in a statement on Aug. 27.
The bungled rollout of the 2024-25 form led to the resignation of Richard Cordray, the previous head of the Federal Student Aid office. The Education Department tapped Jeremy Singer, president of the College Board, to replace Cordray in overseeing the 2025-26 application.
c.2024 The New York Times Company. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
