U.S. colleges and universities won’t receive students’ applications for financial aid until at least early March, the Education Department said Tuesday.
The delay is the result of the department’s decision to fix an error in how students’ aid eligibility is calculated. The fix is intended to cover students entering college for the 2024-25 academic year.
Normally, schools receive student data from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, in late fall or early winter, soon after students start receiving the applications themselves starting in October.
But a bumpy rollout of a new, simplified FAFSA form mandated by Congress in 2020 led to current students’ being unable to fully access applications until the first week of 2024, signaling that delays in getting financial aid offers from schools for the coming academic year would be inevitable.
Then, the department confirmed this month that it had failed to update the tables used to calculate students’ families’ eligibility based on inflation.
The series of mishaps ultimately led to Tuesday’s announcement.
“On the very day that schools were expecting FAFSA applicant information, they were instead notified by the U.S. Department of Education that they shouldn’t expect to receive that data until March, at the earliest,” Justin Draeger, the president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said in a statement Tuesday.
“These continued delays, communicated at the last minute, threaten…
