“The mistakes just keep piling up,” Buzynski said. “We need to start packing in the rewards, but how can we trust this data?
Colleges and universities face a growing list of technical issues with the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which determines a student’s eligibility for grants and loans to pay for education. These errors will likely force the Department of Education to reprocess many applications, which could further delay some students’ receipt of aid offers. The agency has already said it miscalculated around 200,000 cases it processed before March 21. Now, university leaders fear this is just the tip of the iceberg.
It’s the latest hiccup in the tumultuous rollout of the new financial aid form, known as the FAFSA, which has shaken up the college admissions season. Students are eager to know how much their college education will cost them, but the federal government is making it increasingly difficult for schools to give precise answers.
In interviews with a dozen college financial aid officials and college presidents, administrators identified at least nine errors in the processed aid application records that the Department of Education sent to them sent since mid-March. The department has publicly acknowledged some errors but has been more discreet about others, frustrating some university leaders.
We do not know exactly how many students are affected by these errors.
One of the biggest concerns for schools is incorrect tax data appearing in records. A 2019 law passed by Congress makes it easier for the IRS and Department of Education to share taxpayer data with parental consent, a move that reduces the number of questions parents must answer on the FAFSA .
But colleges that use another financial aid form produced by the College Board say they have compared tax returns from previous years and found that the new FAFSA does not correctly retrieve 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 received is also inaccurate in some documents, as is information on total federal taxes paid.
Buzynski spotted the tax errors among the 15,000 files she received so far from the Ministry of Education. “I don’t know if the problem is with the IRS or the department, but it’s clear they haven’t found the right solution yet.”
The Department of Education and the IRS said they identified the errors and corrected them Tuesday. . The department found that less than 20 percent of the 6.5 million applications processed are affected by tax data issues, 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 alerted the Department of Education last week after learning of the tax errors and waiting for more answers.
“It’s like radio silence from the department other than ‘we’ve received the complaints and are looking into them,'” McCarthy said, although she understands the agency needs time to do more research and make a plan.
Still, McCarthy worries that without more communication from the Department of Education, colleges that lack the resources or capabilities to closely analyze FAFSA records could just assume that what they received from agency is correct.
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, we have to take it literally that if we receive (the records), they are accurate,” said Marc M. Camille, president of Albertus Magnus College. “But the ones we have received so far have errors.” The private 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. So far, few freshmen have committed so far this spring, which Camille suspects is because they are still waiting for aid.
“The delays in getting information to students and the inaccuracy of information reaching us is becoming scary for us,” he said.
In March, the Ministry of Education said that of the 1.5 million records sent before March 21, 200,000 had been miscalculated. The agency neglected to include students’ reported savings and investments, which could have led colleges to offer more money than students were eligible for.
The problem has been resolved, but the ministry must recalculate the affected files and has not yet provided a definitive timetable. Meanwhile, he said: colleges can manually recalculate erroneous data to create interim aid packages.
At Samford University in Alabama, Lane Smith, director of student financial services, said his team is reviewing some 500 new freshmen financial records received before March 21 and will manually recalculate those affected by the error. That means a lot more work than Smith anticipated, but it will help keep the private university on track to get aid offers in early April.
“It’s not a job you necessarily want to do, is it? You want to be sure that what you received from the department is accurate,” Smith said. “We have a great team and we want our students who need help to get an offer as quickly as possible, so we are doing our best to make that happen.”
Rachelle Feldman, vice provost for enrollment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said “it makes no sense” for the department to think an institution of its size could recalculate the nearly 40,000 files received by his team before March 21.
In addition to the asset error, Feldman and other university leaders are concerned that a high percentage of the records they received must be returned to applicants for correction. The Department of Education regularly rejects FAFSA applications due to misspelled names, incomplete addresses or missing signatures, but schools this year are reporting rejection rates two or three times higher than usual.
So far, about 20 percent of UNC’s recordings have been reported. In previous cycles, the rejection rate was in the single digits.
At the University of New Hampshire, 18 percent of the 14,800 records received need to be corrected, about double the proportion from the previous year, said Kim DeRego, the school’s chief enrollment officer. In the meantime, Aaron Geist, associate director of financial aid at George Fox University in Oregon, said the 17 percent rejection rate of applications he’s gotten is about 10 percent higher than the ‘last year.
College administrators suspect some high error rates result from technical problems encountered by students complete the new financial aid form. They say mistakes are easy to correct, but the Ministry of Education does not yet allow students to do so.
On Monday, the department said students will have to wait until the first half of April to change their financial aid forms, nearly a month later than the agency had initially 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 the features of the FAFSA process piece by piece.
Given the high rejection rate, universities are concerned that some students may not receive an offer of financial aid until May. Many colleges have pushed back the usual May 1 application deadline by two weeks or a month. But given ongoing problems, that might not yet be enough for some students.
“We’re trying to be optimistic that these issues are going to resolve themselves,” said UNC’s Feldman. Still, she said the public flagship program would be flexible regarding its application deadline for students whose offers are severely delayed. “We are not going to ask any student to decide to come to Carolina without knowing their financial situation.”
Currently, most colleges are still testing and reviewing the FAFSA records they receive from the Department of Education. On Tuesday, the federal agency said it had now processed 7 million applications and processing times had returned to normal, meaning colleges and institutions will receive files within one to three days after students submit the form.
washingtonpost
