Last year, in a fit of masochism, I tried to become the first person in the United States to fill out a FAFSA (short for Free Application for Federal Student Aid) form at the precise moment the Department of Education unveiled a long-delayed overhaul.
I failed in my New Year’s Eve quest because the site wasn’t working, and the experience was a harbinger for millions of others. The rollout of the new FAFSA was one of the most epic digital fiascos of our time, right up there with the Obamacare website’s disastrous debut and the Equifax breach.
For several months, many of the most vulnerable teenagers — people with an undocumented parent or others without a Social Security number, or students whose parents didn’t speak English and made data entry errors that they then could not immediately fix — were frozen in place, unable to determine whether they qualified for the grants and loans that could make college affordable. At one school’s FAFSA completion event, only 20 percent of students finished.
This week, the department tried again, opening the gates to the FAFSA website after months of additional revisions and multiple rounds of beta testing.
It’s safe. Go ahead and fill yours out. I got through my part of the form in under 20 minutes. Importing tax information from the Internal Revenue Service was so fast that I was sure I had done it wrong. My daughter did her part in about 10 minutes. She received our results, the so-called Student Aid Index figure, right afterward.
We’re not the people anyone should worry about, though, given our citizenship, permanent address and up-to-date income tax filings.
This year, the department did what it should have done last year: tested the form with community organizations that serve students who often have complex family situations. Those efforts have also gone well.
Last year, Christine Miller, director of college advising at the Scholarship Fund of Alexandria in Virginia, used her commute home to rid herself of accumulated expletives, she said. During this year’s testing phase, over 95 percent of the students her organization serves have completed their forms without incident. This includes students from families in which a parent may not have a Social Security number.
It has helped that chastened Education Department employees have been on a charm offensive. They’ve gone to testing sessions and squashed bugs in real time. So far this cycle, over 167,000 people have completed their forms.
If you’re ready to join them, keep a few things in mind. First-time FAFSA applicants need a so-called FSA ID number before they can start the form. A nonprofit called uAspire has a website with excellent guides to the process of getting the FSA ID, and the Education Department has a tool on its site to help people figure out which parents or others should get the ID in addition to the student.
When you sit down to fill out the FAFSA, make sure you have the pertinent income tax forms. I thought the system would transfer every bit of data that I needed, but there was a question about foreign earned income that the forms helped me answer.
Next, have anyone else who may need to participate in the process — your child, your spouse, your parent — beside you or on speed dial for questions. You can save your spot and return to the form, but it is probably better to just blast through the thing in one sitting.
All of us FAFSA applicant supplicants — there could be over 15 million for this next school year — are each just the first cog in the financial aid wheel. Next, the Education Department has to seamlessly push the data to colleges. Then the schools need to be able to make corrections en masse — something else that was broken last time around.
Families sometimes see financial aid administrators as blockers whose job it is to tell them there is no more grant money available. More frequently, however, administrators are heroes who navigate a messy federal aid system that they wouldn’t wish on their enemies but have no power to change.
“We had a meeting to ask one another what we were doing to make sure the financial aid staff was all right,” said Stephen Schultheis, vice president of enrollment management at Middle Georgia State University, while explaining what the last aid season was like.
The incoming Trump administration is a wild card. The smart thing for the pick for secretary of education, Linda McMahon, to do might be to say nothing about the FAFSA. Then, if things continue to go well, she could take credit next August for work she had nothing to do with.
As for the people who really are doing the work, it’s hard to erase fresh memories of disappointed teenagers coming back to them multiple times for help filling out the deadbolted form that could unlock their futures. The students remember it, too. The ones who have finished their FAFSAs this year can’t quite believe that it actually worked.
“More than once this fall, I remember hearing, ‘That’s it?’” Ms. Miller, director of the Scholarship Fund of Alexandria, said. “‘Are you sure?’”
That’s probably it. We’re kind of sure. Let’s cross our fingers that we don’t disappoint them again.
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