New Developments in the FAFSA Saga
The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) continues to be front and center in Washington with the Department of Education, the Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) and the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions making news.
The Education Department announced several updates to this year’s FAFSA, with the biggest news being that next year’s FAFSA will launch on December 1, not October 1. In addition, the agency shared that batch corrections will not be available until next year. The Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a report on the agency’s implementation of the federal tax information (FTI) provisions related to the new FAFSA. Lastly, the Senate committee’s Labor-Health and Human Services (Labor-HHS) appropriations bill included report language about the FAFSA.
Department of Education Updates
The Department formally announced that the 2025-26 FAFSA will launch on December 1 this year. Beginning on October 1, the Department will begin a testing phase with a small group of students and institutions, and slowly scale that up until the public launch in December. More information is forthcoming over the next few weeks.
It was also recently announced that FAFSA batch corrections will not be available until next year’s FAFSA process. . The Department decided to do this because they were not able to deliver this functionality before fall semester began, and because they would like to focus their resources on the development, testing, and release of the 2025-26 form.
To help institutions that have large numbers of corrections left to submit, the Department is expanding their College Support Strategy to provide third-party technical assistance to aid schools in submitting manual corrections through the FAFSA Partner Portal. Institutions interested in this assistance may apply here.
The Department also is extending the compliance flexibilities announced earlier this year, such as extending the suspension of routine program reviews from June 2024 until September 2024. More information can be found here.
In addition, the Department announced:
- The technical workaround for contributors without a Social Security Number (SSN) is being preserved through the 2025-26 cycle. Previously, the Department announced that FAFSA contributors without an SSN would need to complete the identity validation process prior to next year’s FAFSA to prevent being locked out of the system. The Department will release an update on a long-term solution in the future. More information can be found here.
- Paper FAFSA forms are now being processed by the Department after several delays. There are 34,000 unduplicated paper forms (or 0.3% of all FAFSAs) to process, and 25,000 of them are complete. The remainder are being sent back to applicants with instructions on how to resolve discrepancies and resubmit. More information can be found here.
Office of the Inspector General Report
The OIG report examined whether the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) effectively implemented the provisions related to FTI from the FAFSA Simplification Act and the FUTURE Act.
The report found that FSA did not effectively monitor “...the systems’ costs and budgets, its performance oversight of the contractors responsible for implementing the systems, and its management of the risks, decisions, and issues pertaining to the systems’ implementation.”
The OIG found that these failures led to project cost overruns of $3.04 million dollars.
Senate Appropriations Report Language
The Senate appropriations bill included report language requiring the Department of Education to submit several reports to Congress on several FAFSA related issues including:
- Raw data on numerous aspects of the last two years of FAFSA submissions, including number of forms processed, average turnaround times, number of errors leading to resubmission, and more
- An impact analysis on the changes made to the underlying need analysis and eligibility criteria for this year’s form, including the family farm and siblings in college changes
- An impact study on the requiring applicants to report their family farms as assets
- A report on the outcomes of the Department’s Student Support Strategy
Further, the Department must also provide to Congress a detailed spending plan and timeline for the 2025-26 FAFSA release and, should the form be delayed beyond October 1, provide weekly briefings to committee members until the form is launched.