When entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy arrive in Washington, they will not have to look far for government incompetence and waste. But President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, can do more than cut wasteful spending. Musk and Ramaswamy could start by fixing an online form that last year blocked an estimated 1 million low-income students from going to college.
The Free Application for Federal Student Aid is painful but necessary paperwork college students must submit to be eligible for federal student loans, Pell Grants, and other forms of financial aid. No matter what the future holds for the Department of Education, the FAFSA will need to exist in some form for as long as the federal government is involved in college lending.
Congress passed the FAFSA Modernization and Simplification Act in 2020, which directed the department to streamline the FAFSA by the fall of 2023. Then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was already well on the way to meeting that deadline. In 2017, the department unveiled a mobile-friendly version of the application, which was used by 375,000 people in its first year.
The Biden-Harris administration did nothing with the progress it inherited. Instead, it delayed the annual release of the form by several months and then debuted a FAFSA riddled with errors.
The new FAFSA failed to account for inflation and contained a formula error that incorrectly determined Pell Grant eligibility, per the House Budget Committee. To make matters worse, the FAFSA kicked out many students in the middle of completing the form, and it was impossible to complete for any student with a non-citizen parent. The form erroneously deleted online signatures seemingly at random.
Thousands of calls to the agency’s helpline went unanswered. An estimated 430,000 students gave up on completing the form. For those who could, the headaches were only just beginning. In early March of this year, the department found 70,000 unread emails containing data needed to process the forms accurately. Later that month, the department admitted that it had processed nearly one out of every five applications incorrectly. Data was sent to colleges months behind schedule, which set colleges significantly behind in preparing financial aid offers for accepted students and required financial aid administrators to work overtime for months.
Many college hopefuls were forced to decide whether to attend college, and where to enroll, based on incomplete information about the aid available to them.
The FAFSA disaster was especially acute for students from low-income families. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 1 million fewer students are receiving Pell Grants this year than expected. College freshmen enrollment shrank by 5% this fall compared to last year. Schools serving a high percentage of low-income students saw more than a 10% drop in freshmen enrollment, as noted by the American Enterprise Institute. This threatens the survival of these institutions.
The Biden-Harris administration talks a big game about equity and inclusion. But when the Education Department placed a hurdle in the way of low-income students, officials had very little to say. Perhaps they were too focused on transferring billions of student debt onto taxpayers to bother with their legal responsibility to simplify the FAFSA.
A one-year aberration would be bad enough, but the department has yet to fix its FAFSA failure. This year, it delayed the planned Oct. 1 release date until the beginning of December. This creates problems for colleges, which will now (yet again) have to process aid offers on a very short timeline, and for students, who will have to decide where to enroll without knowing whether they can afford to attend the schools of their choosing.
Congress has recognized the Biden-Harris administration’s failures, and the FAFSA Deadline Act sailed through the House of Representatives earlier this month. The bill would require the department to fix the FAFSA — for real, this time — and publish it by no later than Oct. 1 annually. This deadline is not arbitrary. To the contrary, the deadline ensures that the department has enough time to process the FAFSA forms and distribute data, colleges have enough time to create and distribute financial aid offers, and students have enough time to evaluate those offers.
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Though college is not for everyone, the decision of whether to attend college and what to study ultimately is up to the individual. No student should have an educational pathway closed off to him or her by government mismanagement. Yet this is exactly what happened, thanks to the Biden-Harris FAFSA fiasco.
For men who launch spaceships and run biotech firms, fixing the FAFSA should be an easy win. For students hoping to get to college, fixing the FAFSA is essential.
Angela Morabito is the spokesperson for the Defense of Freedom Institute and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.