America’s colleges have been consumed in recent weeks with the disruptions caused by the student protests over the Israel-Hamas war.
What’s gotten a lot less attention, though, is a development that could cause more lasting harm to these institutions: a bungled upgrade to a federal financial aid form.
When the U.S. Department of Education announced it was going to overhaul the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), it said the changes would make the form simpler to complete.
It has been anything but.
Numerous technical glitches have prevented the students and their families from submitting the forms that most college financial aid offices require before they decide how much and what kind of aid to offer a student. According to an article this week from The Associated Press, successfully submitted FAFSAs are down 29% from this same time last year. As a result, many students, especially incoming freshmen, still have no idea where they will be attending college next year because they don’t know yet what they and their families will be able to afford.
The hang-ups have been so frustrating that there are growing fears among college admissions offices that hundreds of thousands of students may just skip college next year.
That would be an unwelcome early start to the “enrollment cliff” that demographers and colleges have said is only a couple of years away, when America’s declining birth rate and the premature deaths caused by COVID-19 will negatively impact college enrollment numbers for a projected five to 10 years.
Anyone who has been involved with computer programming knows that there are always bugs, so it’s not surprising that the new FAFSA form has its share of them. What’s alarming is that the Education Department decided to roll out the new FAFSA obviously before it had been fully vetted.
Maybe some geniuses in the Education Department thought that they’d save some money on development by letting the public test out the form — and report the bugs for correcting — in real time. If that was their idea, it was a terrible one.
