Financial aid administrators at Oregon’s public universities and colleges are scrambling after learning they will not receive student aid data from the federal government until March. Most public schools rely on this data to compile financial aid packages it offers to students. This delay is just one of many associated with the rocky rollout of the U.S. Department of Education’s new 2024-2025 Free Application for Federal Student Aid form, also known as FAFSA.
Portland State University
Hanin Najjar / OPB
In a normal year, students would’ve been filling out forms months ago and the federal government would have shared data with colleges shortly thereafter. Institutions like Oregon State University would be preparing to send out financial aid packages to students in March, said the school’s Director of Financial Aid Keith Raab.
“Obviously, we won’t be able to do that this year because we won’t even have the data to get started on until early March,” said Raab.
In a statement Tuesday, the Education Department said it expects to begin sending batches of student information gathered from the new FAFSA to higher education institutions in mid-March. The agency previously gave itself a self-imposed deadline of late January to begin sending out this information to schools.
Schools across the country, including in Oregon, usually send out financial aid packages as early as February and ask students to commit by May 1. This new delay from the federal government means colleges and universities will have to scramble to get their financial aid packages ready for students.
Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost of enrollment management at Oregon State said asking prospective students to meet that May 1 deadline is unlikely to happen this year at OSU — especially if the Education Department continues to push back its own deadlines.
“We’re talking about hundreds, maybe thousands of students who are sitting there without any financial aid from any of the colleges they’ve applied to,” said Boeckenstedt. “It would be grossly unfair to expect them to make a decision for fall enrollment when they just don’t know what college is going to cost them.”
Boeckenstedt said OSU administrators are meeting later this week to discuss how to mitigate the situation for students and families.
The rollout of the new 2024-2025 FAFSA has been rough, to say the least. First, the Education Department barely met a legal deadline to have the new application available and online by the end of 2023. The application was plagued by technical difficulties during the week it launched and was only available for a limited amount of time. It began to be accessible 24 hours a day on Jan. 8.
Then, news outlets reported the Education Department got a key part of its new needs analysis equation wrong: it was not accounting for the past few years’ rapid rise in inflation. The error made it seem like families and students were more well off than they really were and it knocked out some students’ eligibility for Pell Grants. The Education Department announced last week that it will fix this error.
This week’s delay stems partly from that fix. In the agency’s statement, it said it will revise its needs-based calculation to account for inflationary adjustments. The department estimated that an additional $1.8 billion in Pell Grant aid will be available to students after the adjustment.
The new FAFSA is a product of the FAFSA Simplification Act. The intent of the law, passed in 2022, was to streamline the financial aid application and expand access to federal Pell Grants. The previous application included more than 100 questions. The new application has less than 40 questions for most people. Barring any technical glitches, the Education Department said it could take less than an hour to fill out.
Nationwide, more than 3.1 million FAFSA applications have been submitted since it launched on Dec. 30.
Though it’s still a waiting game for students and schools who have already filled out the FAFSA, Oregon State’s Raab said students who haven’t done so already shouldn’t wait any longer.
“Just because we don’t get access to [student] information yet doesn’t mean students and families should wait,” said Raab. “Now is a great time to log on, complete the FAFSA application and make sure it’s done for schools when the Education Department is ready to send information out.”