“Mistakes just keep accumulating,” Budzinski said. “I need to start packaging my awards, but how can I trust this data?”
Universities are grappling with a growing number of technical problems in the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which determines students’ eligibility for grants and loans to pay for their tuition. The mistake will likely require the Department of Education to reprocess a large number of applications, potentially causing further delays before some students receive offers of aid. The agency has already announced that it miscalculated about 200,000 records processed by March 21. Now university leaders fear that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
It’s the latest hurdle in the confusing rollout of a new form of financial aid known as the FAFSA. It completely changed the college admissions season. Students want to know how much college will cost, but the federal government is making it increasingly difficult for schools to answer accurately.
In interviews with more than a dozen university financial aid officers and university presidents, administrators identified at least nine errors in records of processed aid applications sent by the Department of Education since mid-March. did. While the department has publicly acknowledged some mistakes, it has remained silent about others, frustrating some university leaders.
It is unclear how many students are affected by this error.
The biggest concern among schools is the inadequacy of tax data on their records. A 2019 law passed by Congress makes it easier for the IRS and Department of Education to share taxpayer data with parental consent, which reduces the number of questions parents must answer on the FAFSA. Ru.
However, colleges using a separate financial aid form created by the College Board found that the new FAFSA did not capture some tax information properly when they compared their tax returns from previous years. It has said. If a family member has filed an amended tax return, the form will incorrectly use the original return. Similar to information about total federal taxes paid, the total amount of education tax credits a student received is also inaccurate in some records.
Budzinski discovered tax errors among 15,000 records. So far we have received from the Ministry of Education. “I don’t know if the problem is with the IRS or he with the IRS, but clearly they haven’t gotten it right yet.”
The Department of Education and the IRS said they are aware of the data retrieval issues. The department said in a notice to financial aid professionals on Friday that it does not believe this issue will affect most previously submitted applications, based on the reports raised.
“The Department and the IRS are working quickly to evaluate the report and determine whether this will impact some applications and whether there are systemic issues that need to be resolved,” said the Under Secretary of Education. James Kvale told The Washington Post in a statement. “We will keep students, families, and schools informed of the circumstances surrounding these reports and provide additional information as soon as possible.”
Karen McCarthy, vice president of public policy and federal relations for the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said the trade group alerted the Department of Education after learning of the tax error last week. I’m waiting for further answers.
McCarthy said he understands the agency needs time to conduct further investigation and plan, but “there’s been a lot of radio silence from the agency other than that we’ve received a complaint and are looking into it.” ” he said.
Still, McCarthy is concerned about the future for colleges that lack the resources or capacity to closely analyze FAFSA records without further communication from the Department of Education. just assume what they received from a person agency It’s accurate.
But skepticism is growing in some quarters, especially after the department recently revealed new errors in hundreds of thousands of records.
“On the one hand, you want to take it at face value if we receive it. [records that] They are accurate,” said Marc M. Camille, president of Albertus Magnus University. “But there were errors in what we received so far.” The private Roman Catholic university in Connecticut, which traditionally attracts students with high financial need, has an enrollment of 1,300. Half of those students receive federal Pell grants, and the number of admitted applicants follows a similar trend. So far this spring, very few prospective freshmen have participated, but Camille suspects that’s because they are still waiting on their aid payments.
“The delays in providing information to students and the inaccuracy of the information that is being passed on has been frightening to us,” he said.
Earlier this month, the Department of Education announced that 200,000 of the 1.5 million records submitted by the department by March 21 were miscalculated. The agency failed to include student-reported savings and investments, which could have led universities to offer more money than students were entitled to.
Although the issue has been resolved, the department still needs to recalculate the affected records and has not yet provided a final timeline. In the meantime, he said: Universities can manually recalculate flawed data to create interim aid packages.
Lane Smith, director of student financial services at Samford University in Alabama, said his team is reviewing about 500 financial records for freshmen students received through March 21, and anyone affected by the error can get help. He said he would recalculate at work. This will mean much more work than Smith anticipated, but it will help private universities stay on track to receive aid offers in early April.
“That’s not necessarily the job we want to do, right? We want to believe that what we receive from the department is correct,” Smith said. “We have a great team and we want students in need to get offers as quickly as possible, so we are doing everything we can to make that happen.”
Rachel Feldman, vice president for admissions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said the department believes a university of her size could recalculate the roughly 40,000 records the team received before March 21. said, “It makes no sense.”
In addition to asset errors, Feldman and other university leaders are concerned that a high percentage of records received must be returned to applicants for correction. The Department of Education regularly rejects FAFSA records for reasons such as misspelled names, incomplete addresses, and missing signatures, and institutions are reporting rejection rates two to three times higher this year than in previous years. are doing.
About 20% of UNC’s records 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 14,800 records need to be corrected, about twice as many as last year, said Kim DeRego, the university’s director of registration. meanwhile, Aaron Geist, associate director of financial aid at George Fox University in Oregon, said records he obtained showed a rejection rate of 17%, about 10% higher than last year.
University administrators suspect that the high error rate is due to technical glitches that students encounter at the university. Complete new financial aid shape. They say the mistakes can be easily corrected, but the Ministry of Education is still not letting students do it.
The ministry announced Monday that students will have to wait until early April to change their scholarship forms, nearly a month later than officials had originally promised. In a normal year, applicants would be able to correct errors as soon as they are discovered, but this year is far from normal as the agency slowly rolls out features of the FAFSA process.
Given the high rejection rate, universities are concerned that some students may not receive a scholarship offer until May. Many universities have postponed their usual May 1 admissions deadlines by two weeks or a month. However, given the ongoing issues, time may not be enough for some. student.
“We’re trying to be optimistic that these problems will resolve themselves,” UNC’s Feldman said. Still, she said public universities will be flexible with admission deadlines for students who receive offers long overdue. “We would not ask students to make a decision to attend Carolina without knowing their financial situation.”
At this time, most colleges are still testing and reviewing the FAFSA records they receive from the Department of Education. The federal agency said it expects to finish processing about 6 million applications and sending records to schools, states and scholarship organizations by the end of March.But some schools say they’re still seeing very little. of data.
As of Tuesday, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Vice President for Enrollment Management Nikki Chun said the university had received three records. This flagship campus has more than 19,000 undergraduate and graduate students and is offering admission to an additional 16,000 students this year.
“I thought we would be able to put together an offer by now,” Chun said. “But as we move into April, we still don’t have any information. For our students, it only increases the likelihood that they will choose not to go to college.”
