Elijah Hurewitz-Ravitch, Contributing Photographer

Last year’s new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, application process resulted in excessive delays, technical glitches and poor communication that burdened students and universities. 

On Sept. 24, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a watchdog organization that audits the federal government, released two reports outlining the disorganized and problematic state of the Department of Education and the 2023-24 admissions cycle FAFSA system. While these reports provide new statistics and internal data from the department, Yale students have been aware of the FAFSA’s shortcomings for months. 

“It stinks. It’s bad. It’s not very good. I don’t know what they’re doing,” said Moe Al Kaabi ’28, who filled out the FAFSA in 2024.

The FAFSA is a form that the ED uses to determine students’ eligibility for federal aid. Students must fill out the FAFSA to qualify for Pell Grants and subsidized student loans, and universities use the FAFSA to determine how much financial aid they distribute to students. 

In December 2020, Congress passed the FAFSA Simplification Act, which mandated the department to design a new FAFSA form that would streamline and simplify the application process. Additionally, this act expanded the Pell Grant program. This modernized and improved form debuted last year during the 2024-25 cycle. 

However, the overhaul was widely regarded as a failure. 

“The rollout of the 24-25 FAFSA was handled very poorly,” Kari DiFonzo, Yale’s director of undergraduate financial aid, wrote in an email to the News. 

FAFSA shortcomings left students on their own

First, the department postponed the opening of the form by three months to Dec. 30. In years past, the FAFSA had been open to students beginning in October. 

Even when students could access the form, many found it dysfunctional. 

“After I logged in, there was this pop-up saying, this website is experiencing a large amount of traffic right now. So it was saying, basically, come back some other time,” explained Melangelo Pride ’26, a first-generation, low-income student ambassador. “I was checking in anxiously, and the website was still not ready. So that was very inconveniencing when I wanted to get the FAFSA filled out over my winter break before I came back for the spring semester.”

When students sought technical assistance, the ED was often unresponsive. The Government Accountability Office found that out of 5.4 million calls made to the department’s call center in the first five months after the form’s release, four million — 74 percent — went unanswered.

Even when answered, department representatives could not provide the necessary support; instead, they suggested that students try again later. 

The defects in the system prolonged the FAFSA rollout; the Federal Student Aid Office did not begin processing students’ forms until March 10, 161 days later than in typical years. 

Al Kaabi, who filled out the form this year, observed the delay’s effects firsthand at his high school. 

“There were a lot of people that relied on FAFSA to know what schools they can go to. The application was so delayed, people that had already gotten into certain schools could not know how much money they would have to pay for months,” he said.

Bruce Poch, the director of college guidance at the School of Los Angeles, also witnessed the burden last year’s FAFSA delays placed on high school seniors applying to colleges. 

Poch worked with many middle and lower-income and first-generation students, many from homes where parents may not be fluent in English. The extra time students had to gather necessary income and tax records to complete the FAFSA was crucial. 

Many colleges require students to apply for financial aid by mid-January and with the FAFSA releasing in late December, students had to scramble to meet this deadline. Poch told the News that families of single and separated parents often rely on those supplementary months to gather financial information, so they may have been disproportionately affected.

After May 1, when many schools required commitment to enroll, many students were still waiting to receive their financial aid packages from universities, Poch recalled. Many schools extended leniency with this deadline due to the FAFSA processing delays. Still, with some students lacking information well into June and July, universities were limited in the accommodations they could offer, Poch said.

Returning Yale students who continue to fill out the FAFSA every year also faced issues. 

Pride, the FGLI student ambassador, told the News she knows peers who had not received their federal aid information back from the ED before the University’s tuition payment deadline. When they could not pay these dues, they were placed on financial hold.

“For students who completed their application by the published due date, financial aid decisions were released well before enrollment or payment deadlines,” wrote DiFonzo, Yale’s director of undergraduate financial aid.

She explained that because Yale relies on the College Scholarship Service Profile, maintained by the College Board, the lack of reliable FAFSA data did not impact her office’s ability to release financial aid decisions to incoming or continuing students. 

The biggest challenge has been having to revisit applications when they do receive FAFSA data to confirm the validity of information and determine eligibility for federal financial aid, DiFonzo wrote.

Difficulties accessing and submitting the new program deterred many from applying for federal student aid. Overall, according to the GAO report, 432,000 fewer students submitted FAFSA applications last year than the previous cycle — a 9 percent decrease. 

“If the process is making it very difficult for people and not calculating things right, that could leave a lot of people without the necessary aid that they need to get a college education, or it just may discourage them from applying at all,” said Cruz. “That’s not okay, especially for something so important.”

Investigation, Congressional oversight

The Government Accountability Office, or GAO, reported that the initial FAFSA form released on Dec. 30 contained 40 distinct technical errors. Retrospective analyses identified 55 defects in the FAFSA Processing System. According to the GAO report, these errors prevented some students from submitting or even starting their forms. 

“The most alarming thing for us is that [the] Department of Education put the system live, knowing that it had defects and knowing that it hadn’t tested the system from beginning to end and still put it out to the public,” GAO Director Marisol Cruz Cain, who led the investigation into the system, told the News. 

Cruz Cain puts “a lot of the blame” on the department leadership and hopes that the report will inspire them “to be more mindful.”

At the House hearing, congresspeople across party lines expressed concerns about the information in the GAO reports. North Carolina Rep. Kathy Manning expressed hopes for a bipartisan effort to ensure educational equality for all American citizens.

Federal officials have acknowledged last year’s bungled rollout. 

“Clearly, this is unacceptable,” FAFSA Executive Advisor Jeremy Singer said in a DoE press briefing call this Monday. “It’s gone on too long, and we’re not serving the students the way we need to.”

For this year’s application cycle, the ED conducts four rounds of FAFSA beta testing — the first of which began Tuesday. However, the FAFSA form is similarly delayed and will not open for the 2025-26 cycle until Dec. 1. 

According to DiFonzo, because of this, Yale has been updating its systems and websites to reflect that it will not require the FAFSA for Early Action and Questbridge Match Scholars at the time of admission, and will not request it until after matriculation

Yalies are still dealing with the effects of last year’s delays. For example, the refund that Yale distributes to students on financial aid for expenses like books and travel arrived several weeks late, according to Al Kaabi.

“We’ve been able to offer and disburse financial aid according to our normal timelines for most students,” DiFonzo wrote. “In August, when we identified challenges around releasing some federal grant funds (Pell Grants), we worked out a process with student accounts to ensure refunds weren’t held up.”

In the 2023-24 school year, 53 percent of Yale College students received some form of financial aid.