The Education Department administers the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) to provide students and families with scholarships and loans. This year, the FAFSA formula was altered which has led to some glitches in the system. The Education Department stated that 200,000 of the 1.5 million applications shared with schools and states need to be recalculated. They miscalculated financial aid opportunities for students who reported their own financial assets on the FAFSA. The miscalculated reports omitted these assets in their calculations leading schools to offer more aid than students actually qualify for.
This mishap adds even more uncertainty to both schools and families trying to make an admissions decision. Justin Draeger, CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, states that "there's a general distrust that there won't be more errors found." The Education Department has declared that only records sent out before March 21 are affected. Additionally, they stated they will reprocess those students whose reports were miscalculated though no official timeline has been declared.
The Education Department have told schools that they can manually calculate tentative financial aid packages for the students affected by the miscalculations. Dawn Medley of Drexel University shared that her team are working 12-14 hour days navigating these errors in order to share financial aid offers with admitted students by April 1. Justin Draeger commented that "it's unrealistic for the government to think schools' financial-aid offices have the resources to run hand calculations on this volume of student files." The FAFSA mishap adds to the many challenges that schools and families already face throughout the admissions process.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/education-department-college-financial-aid-snags-b1b362f6?mod=us-news_lead_pos4
5 comments:
This definitely seems like it will have some admissions ramifications for colleges and students. It is also unfortunate that the mistake is offering more aid than they qualify for because offering aid to a student and then rescinding it could lead students to have made decisions they cannot in reality afford.
This is very unfortunate as with more aid, students probably chose the college based on that amount. If students are getting less aid, this may lead to financial difficulties and even other difficulties such as taking a gap year.
How are colleges and universities coping with the additional workload caused by manually recalculating financial aid for affected students?
That's a very big error. Hopefully it didn't force too many kids too have to quickly change course once they found out they got too much aid. Responsibility definitely falls squarely on the education department here
The FAFSA mess-up is causing stress for students and schools. It's like getting your recipe wrong when baking a cake - it messes up the whole outcome. The Education Department needs to fix this quickly to help students make smart choices about their education.
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