After months of vexing delays, Brenda Buzynski was eager to see the data from federal financial aid forms start coming in. Finally, the University of Iowa administrator thought, she could begin creating aid officers for thousands of students.
“The errors just keep accumulating,” Buzynski said. “We need to start packaging awards, but how do we trust this data?”
Colleges and universities are contending with a growing list of technical problems in the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which determines a student’s eligibility for grants and loans to pay for school. The errors will probably require the Education Department to reprocess numerous applications, which could further delay when some students receive aid offers.
It is the latest snag in the tumultuous rollout of the new financial aid form, known as the FAFSA, that has upended the college admissions season. Students are anxious to know how much college will cost them, but the federal government is making it increasingly difficult for schools to give accurate answers.
In interviews with a dozen college financial aid officers and university presidents, administrators identified at least nine errors in records from the processed aid applications the Education Department has sent them since mid-March. The department has publicly acknowledged some errors but has been quieter about others, frustrating some college leaders.
It is not clear how many students are affected by the errors.
A chief concern among schools is faulty tax data appearing in the records. A 2019 law passed by Congress makes it easier for the IRS and the Education Department to share taxpayer data with parental consent, a transfer that cuts the number of questions that parents have to answer on the FAFSA.
But colleges that use another financial aid form produced by the College Board say they’ve compared tax returns from previous years and found that the new FAFSA is not properly retrieving some tax information. When a family has an amended tax return, the form incorrectly uses the original return. The total amount of education tax credits students have received is also inaccurate in some records, as is information about total federal taxes paid.
Buzynski spotted the tax mistakes among the 15,000 records she had received from the Education Department as of late March. “I don’t know whether the problem is at the IRS or the department, but clearly they haven’t gotten it right yet.”
The Education Department and the IRS said they have identified the errors and fixed them as of Tuesday. . The department found that fewer than 20 percent of the 6.5 million applications that have been processed are affected by the tax data problems, it said in a notice to financial aid professionals.
Karen McCarthy, vice president of public policy and federal relations at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said the trade group had alerted the Education Department to the problem in late March.
She said it was “like radio silence from the department, other than ‘we received the complaints and are looking into them,’” though she understood that the agency needed time to do more research and come up with a plan.
Still, McCarthy worries that, without more communication from the Education Department, colleges that lack the resources or capacity to closely analyze FAFSA records may just assume that what they have received from the agency is accurate.
However, skepticism is growing in some corners, especially after the department recently revealed another error in hundreds of thousands of records.
“On the one hand, you want to take at face value that if we receive [records,] they’re accurate,” said Marc M. Camille, president of Albertus Magnus College. “But the ones we’ve received to date have had errors.” The private Roman Catholic college in Connecticut traditionally attracts students with significant financial need — half of its 1,300 enrollees receive the federal Pell Grant — and its pool of admitted applicants fits the same profile. Few would-be freshmen have committed so far this spring, which Camille suspects is because they are still awaiting aid awards.
“The delays of getting information to students and the inaccuracy of the information that’s coming through is getting scary for us,” he said.
In March, the Education Department said that of the 1.5 million records it sent out before March 21, 200,000 were miscalculated. The agency had neglected to include students’ reported savings and investments, which could have led colleges to offer more money than students were entitled to receive.
The problem has been fixed, but the department must recalculate the affected records and has yet to provide a definitive timeline. In the interim, it said, colleges can manually recalculate the faulty data to create tentative aid packages.
At Samford University in Alabama, Lane Smith, director of student financial services, said his team was combing through some 500 financial records of incoming freshmen it received before March 21 and would manually recalculate those affected by the error. It means far more work than Smith anticipated, but it will help the private university stay on track to get aid offers out.
“It’s not work we necessarily want to do, right? You want to trust that what you’ve received from the department is correct,” Smith said. “We have a great team, and we want our students who need aid to get an offer as soon as possible, so we’re doing our best to make that happen.”
Rachelle Feldman, vice provost for enrollment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said “it doesn’t make any sense” for the department to think an institution of her size could recalculate the nearly 40,000 records her team received before March 21.
In addition to the asset error, Feldman and other college leaders worry that a high percentage of the records they’ve received must be returned to applicants for correction. The Education Department routinely rejects FAFSA records because of misspelled names, incomplete addresses or missing signatures, but institutions are reporting rejection rates that are two or three times higher than usual this year.
About 20 percent of the records at UNC have been flagged so far. In previous cycles, the rejection rate was in the single digits.
At the University of New Hampshire, 18 percent of the 14,800 received records must be corrected — about double the share from the prior year, said Kim DeRego, the institution’s head of enrollment. Meanwhile, Aaron Geist, associate director of financial aid at George Fox University in Oregon, said the 17 percent rejection rate for the records he’s gotten is about 10 percent higher than last year.
College administrators suspect that some high error rates result from technical glitches students encountered in completing the new financial aid form. They say the mistakes are easy to fix, but the Education Department isn’t letting students do that yet.
In late March, the department said students would have to wait until the first half of April to make changes to their financial aid form, nearly a month later than the agency originally promised. In a normal year, applicants can correct errors as quickly as they are discovered, but this year is anything but normal as the department rolls out functions of the FAFSA process piece by piece.
Given the high rate of rejections, colleges fear that some students won’t have a financial aid offer in hand until May. Many colleges have pushed back their usual May 1 enrollment deadline by two weeks or a month. But given the ongoing problems, that still might not be enough time for some students.
“We’re trying to be optimistic that these problems are going to work themselves out,” said Feldman at UNC. Still, she said the public flagship will be flexible with its enrollment deadline for students whose offers are severely delayed. “We’re not going to ask any student to decide on coming to Carolina without knowing their financial situation.”
At this point, most colleges are still testing and reviewing the FAFSA records they receive from the Education Department. On Tuesday, the federal agency said it has now processed 7 million applications and processing timelines have returned to normal, meaning colleges and institutions will receive records one to three days after students submit the form.
