FAFSA Chaos Had Bigger Impact on Minority Students

The botched rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid disproportionately affected low-income Black and Latino students, according to a new report from the Century Foundation. As of May, nearly 300,000 fewer high school seniors had filled out the FAFSA this year than in 2023, the report found. But communities with large Black and Latino populations, a high number of residents living in poverty, or a preponderance of adults without college degrees had a 20 percent larger year-over-year completion gap than those with low shares of those populations.