The U.S. Department of Education will provide $50 million to help colleges with financial aid work in response to delays caused by the slow rollout of the revised Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.
The agency on Monday said nonprofit groups will be charged with hiring current and retired financial aid professionals to supplement existing college staff and offer technical assistance and training as schools process FAFSA data and prepare financial aid offers to students. The Education Department also said it will deploy about 50 of its own experts to provide on-campus and virtual support to schools in the coming weeks and months.
The help is targeted for schools that are most in need of support, including those with fewer administrative staff, older computer systems, as well as historically Black and tribal colleges.
“Our hope is that the steps that we’re announcing today are going to go a long way to helping colleges and universities make the most of the better FAFSA,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona in a Monday press call.
Delays have beleaguered the financial aid process for the 2024-2025 school year, slowing down the admission and enrollment timeline for high school seniors applying for colleges.
The FAFSA form typically opens to students Oct. 1. But it didn’t launch until Dec. 30 because of a redesign intended to streamline the application and make more students eligible for federal aid.
Colleges had expected to start receiving FAFSA data in late January, but last week, the Education Department announced it won’t send that information until the first half of March. Colleges need that information to prepare financial aid offers that students use to compare the cost to attend different schools.
Officials have blamed the delays on several factors, including most recently time taken to update calculations to account for inflation, work that critics have said should have been done earlier.
A senior official in the Education Department said the funding and additional support unveiled Monday arose out of ongoing conversations with colleges and their vendors.
The sluggish start means students won’t have as much time to review financial aid information before the May 1 decision deadline by which many colleges require students to make deposits for fall enrollment. Some schools, including Kalamazoo College in Michigan and the University of Illinois Chicago, have extended those deadlines to early June, and numerous college associations have urged more colleges to do the same.
Pushing back that decision deadline is “a good idea,” said Richard Cordray, chief operating officer of Federal Student Aid, in a phone interview with the AJC. It takes pressure off students and their families by giving them more time to decide where they should go to school.
Georgia schools already are making adjustments, such as preparing more financial aid estimates to give students a general idea of the cost before the FAFSA information is available. Georgia Tech is preparing to process about 30,000 financial aid applications over roughly a month instead of handling that volume over half a year.
Education Department officials said they don’t yet have a list of what colleges will receive extra support.
A new concierge service within the Federal Student Aid office will give colleges a place to go to ask questions and find resources.
“We don’t want them to be hurt here by any issues in this process,” said Cordray. “One of the things we are doing is deploying personnel, we’re directing funding and we’re releasing tools to help schools that we know can use that help to better get aid packages for their students and their incoming students especially.”
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