High school seniors from lower-income families were the most likely to abandon their financial aid applications as the result of a delayed and continuously botched rollout of a new application form late last year.
That’s one finding from a set of new reports from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office probing the U.S. Department of Education’s failed rollout of what was supposed to be a simplified and streamlined Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
The reports detail the delays in the deployment of the new FAFSA as well as reduced testing of the new form before its eventual launch on Dec. 31, 2023—three months after the form’s typical release.
As a result of scaled-back testing of the form’s functionality before its release, the GAO found, the department failed to find dozens of defects that held up student submissions and caused endless frustration.
According to the reports, the U.S. Department of Education’s office of financial student aid identified 55 defects with the FAFSA Processing System after the launch. And when students and families called the Education Department for help, three-quarters of those calls went unanswered.
The FAFSA rollout failures frustrated students and families who needed accurate financial aid estimates so they could decide on a college to attend, according to the reports, which were introduced in conjunction with a Sept. 24 U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee hearing.
When the form first launched, students who were born in the year 2000 “could not progress past a certain page in the online application, preventing them from submitting their application,” one of the reports said.
The Education Department fixed that defect in March, but others remained. For example, parent and student signatures sometimes disappeared from the forms, rendering the forms incomplete and preventing applicants from submitting them, Melissa Emrey-Arras, director of the GAO’s education, workforce, and income security team, said during the subcommittee hearing.
“There are other issues with parents not being able to contribute information, parents not being able to move past certain screens,” Emrey-Arras said. “There are also issues with incorrect information being provided. Graduate students are falsely told they are eligible for Pell grants. This is not true, and this is not resolved.”
When students tried to get help, their main avenue for support—the Education Department’s call center—was unreliable, Emrey-Arras said. Around three-quarters of the calls to the department’s help center—about 4 million of the 5.4 million calls placed—went unanswered from January through May 2024, according to the GAO. Additionally, people calling the help center couldn’t access help in languages other than English or Spanish.
“It’s unconscionable that 4 million calls went unanswered when students were struggling,” Emrey-Arras said.
The problems with FAFSA resulted in a 3 percent decline in the number of students who submitted applications for student aid as of Aug. 25, amounting to 432,000 fewer students applying in 2024-25 than the prior year. The vast majority of those applicants—325,000—were graduating high school seniors. In a letter to college presidents released Tuesday, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said that the gap has since narrowed to a 2 percent decline in submitted applications as of Sept. 20.
No data are yet available on whether the students who didn’t submit applications put off attending college because of the FAFSA errors, but the decline in submissions was most pronounced among low-income students, who are more likely to need financial aid to attend college, Emrey-Arras said.
Among applicants whose parents do not claim them as dependents for tax purposes, the decline in submissions was largest for people making less than $30,000 a year. Among dependent applicants, including graduating high school seniors, the drop in submissions was largest for families making $30,0000 to $48,000 annually.
FAFSA rollout evokes some agreement among Republicans and Democrats
In a rare moment of unity, both Republicans and Democrats on the House’s subcommittee on higher education and the workforce described the FAFSA rollout as a failure and agreed that blame lies with the Education Department.
“The FAFSA has become a headache and nightmare for millions of students and their parents, thanks to this administration,” Rep. Burgess Owens, R-Utah, the subcommittee’s chair, said during the hearing.
“This hearing, at its core, is about the students who have been denied an opportunity because of the department’s mistakes, and how can we make sure that the department does not repeat those mistakes for the upcoming school year?” Rep. Frederica Wilson of Florida, the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, said in her opening remarks.
In a Tuesday statement, an Education Department spokesperson listed steps the agency plans to take to improve the FAFSA process this year and referred to Cardona’s Tuesday letter to college presidents.
In that letter, the education secretary wrote that the department has been “working tirelessly” to improve the FAFSA experience. It outlines 10 steps the agency is taking to address the GAO’s concerns, including providing additional guidance to parents and families for accessing and completing the form, fully staffing the call center, and implementing user experience and technical fixes.
GAO recommends stronger leadership and better communication moving forward
The accountability office provided 13 recommendations to the Education Department in the two reports.
One report recommended that the agency step up testing of the FAFSA system, recruit an outside party to confirm the system is working for students, and appoint a chief information officer who has a “significant role in the governance and oversight of” FAFSA.
On Friday, the department announced that Thomas N. Flagg, who previously worked in information technology at the U.S. Department of Labor, will start work as its new CIO on Oct. 6.
The second report recommended, among other things, that the federal student aid office:
- identify and reach out to students who didn’t submit a FAFSA form in the 2024-25 cycle;
- increase department call center staffing;
- streamline identity verification for students whose parents or spouses don’t have Social Security numbers (the 2024-25 form required parents and spouses to register and have their Social Security numbers verified before filling out the forms, making it impossible for people without Social Security numbers to proceed);
- improve translation services to support languages other than English and Spanish; and
- provide FAFSA applicants with timely updates on their applications’ status.
Last month, the Education Department announced it will use a phased approach to roll out the 2025-26 FAFSA application in hopes of addressing technical glitches before the form becomes available to all students by Dec. 1.
Under the rollout, a subset of students will have access to the 2025-26 form starting Oct. 1—which is typically the date when the form is released to all applicants. The department will monitor that group’s experience for any technical problems or other hiccups to ensure form submissions are running smoothly by Dec. 1, when the form becomes universally available.
Although the department announced this plan in a news release and press conference, the Government Accountability Office has not received the plan in writing to evaluate the details.
“They have verbally given us promises that they’re going to continue to do better testing and have better plans to address system defects, but we have not seen any documents that involve what the test plans would look like [or] if they plan on conducting any independent reviews,” Marisol Cruz Cain, the director of the GAO’s information and cybersecurity team, said at the House hearing. “We’ve heard a lot of testimonial evidence about their plans, but haven’t received any documentation to back those up.”
