The College Financial-Aid Scramble

Students are bearing the brunt of the disastrous FAFSA overhaul. That may affect where they go to college—and whether they enroll at all.

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An attempt to simplify federal financial-aid forms led to a bureaucratic mess. That may shape where students go to college—and whether they enroll at all.

Even under the best conditions, applying to college is rarely easy. But this year, the process became an extraordinary source of stress for many American families when the planned rollout of a simplified Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form devolved into a series of delays and website glitches that left students in limbo.

The plan to simplify the FAFSA process has been a few years in the making: In 2020, as part of a massive spending bill, Congress ordered the Department of Education to create a shorter version of the FAFSA form; the new application reduces the maximum number of questions from 108 to 36. The goal was to make things easier for applicants and increase the number of students who could receive federal aid—“a rare win for bipartisan, commonsense governance,” my colleague Rose Horowitch wrote. But in recent months, the new FAFSA rollout has met roadblocks and delays at almost every turn. The form was supposed to launch in October, but it didn’t open up until the very end of December. Even after the soft launch, many families encountered various lockouts and issues, and students whose parents don’t have Social Security numbers struggled to submit the form.

By late last month, around the time when many students were receiving admissions decisions, some 2 million FAFSA forms were in purgatory, Rose reported. The FAFSA fiasco, my colleague Adam Harris told me, is “a result of the administration overestimating the resources it would have at its disposal—time, people, money—in order to complete an inherited overhaul.” That lack of resources, he explained, combined with missed contractor deadlines and miscommunication, led to a bungled process.

The botched rollout has posed problems for students who want to compare financial-aid offers before they commit to a university, Sandy Baum, an expert on higher-education financing and a nonresident senior fellow at the Urban Institute, told me. But the stakes are even higher for students who are on the fence about enrolling: This fiasco may “transform the life of somebody who just says, Well, I guess I’m not going to be able to go to college at all.”

As of April 12, only 29 percent of high-school seniors had completed their FAFSA forms, down from more than 46 percent last year at the same time, according to data from the National College Attainment Network (NCAN). Baum suggested that some of the dropoff was because people ran into so many roadblocks that they gave up. But others were also likely scared away from even trying. “Everybody has heard about this problem,” she said. The decline has been especially stark at schools where many students of color and low-income students are enrolled, according to NCAN.

None of this is likely to help the perception among some students that college is out of reach. Recent news stories reported that certain colleges are on the brink of costing six figures a year, including tuition, housing, and personal expenses. Many students at public and private institutions don’t actually pay the sticker price after factoring in grants, loans, and other aid, and most colleges don’t charge nearly that much—but not everybody knows that, Baum said.

The FAFSA debacle collides with a number of other higher-education issues, Laura Perna, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. In 2022, the number of young students enrolled in college dropped by roughly 1.2 million from its 2011 peak, and polling shows that many people are questioning the value of higher education. Perna worries that this year’s financial-aid fiasco might diminish trust in the FAFSA system, which requires families to submit a huge amount of personal information.

As May 1, the traditional college-commitment deadline, approaches, many people are scrambling to figure out what financial assistance they might get. Some colleges have already extended their deadlines; others are leaving the situation in students’ hands. Baum is optimistic that in the long run, the simplified FAFSA process will mean more people are eligible for federal aid. Still, this year’s senior class is bearing the brunt of many bureaucratic failures and missteps. “If students don’t go to college this year, will they go next year or will they just never go?” she wonders. “That’s something we don’t know yet.”

Recently, a man visiting his parents’ newly renovated home recognized an eerily familiar white curve in their tile floor. To the man, a dentist, it looked just like a jawbone. He could even count the teeth—one, two, three, four, five, at least. They seemed much like the ones he stares at all day at work.

The jawbone appeared at once very humanlike and very old, and the dentist took his suspicions to Reddit. Could it be that his parents’ floor tile contains a rare human fossil? Quite possibly. It’s “clearly hominin,” John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who also blogged about the discovery, told me in an email. (Hominin refers to a group including modern humans, archaic humans such as Neanderthals, and all of their ancestors.) It is too soon to say exactly how old the jawbone is or exactly which hominin it belonged to, but signs point to something—or someone—far older than modern humans.

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