Washington students were on U.S. Sen. Patty Murray’s mind when she negotiated a law to simplify the application for federal financial aid.
Slightly more than 40% of Washington’s high school seniors filled out last year’s FAFSA, ranking the state 46th in the nation. The state has been at the bottom for years, placing far behind those that require graduating seniors to fill out the form.
Murray hopes the FAFSA Simplification Act can change that. The law reduced the number of questions on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and expanded aid to students who had previously been overlooked because of their income, criminal background or housing status. The law also links tax data to the application, reducing families’ need to manually enter income information.
Despite the changes, the law has yet to have its intended effect. After glitches plagued the rollout of the new application last year, the Department of Education received 3% fewer applications nationwide.
But Murray said this year will be different.
“It’s out, it works, and it takes 10 to 15 minutes to fill out,” she said in an interview last week.
Murray spearheaded the bill in 2020, when she was chairperson of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.
“I encountered too many young people who said they couldn’t afford college and who said that the form was too difficult,” Murray said.
Under the new law, around 10% more students nationwide are on track to receive Pell Grants this year, according to Murray’s office.
The state, facing a shortage of people with the credentials required for the job market, has tried to work around lackluster participation. A new law guarantees access to financial aid from the state if their family is on food stamps, which is about $60,000 a year for a family of four. That will kick in for the 2025-26 year.
Murray said it’s a smart workaround, but federal money is still being left on the table every year because participation rates are low.
“I would say to everybody, give it a shot, and find out there’s a door for you for higher education,” Murray said.
Families experienced problems with the form last year because it was implemented while the U.S. Department of Education upgraded its data processing systems. Congress did not anticipate the overhaul coinciding with the law’s implementation.
“They did a bad job,” said Murray, speaking about the department’s rollout of the form. “To their credit, they worked hard … But you have to work really hard with the agencies to make sure they stay on top of it.”
U.S. Department of Education Undersecretary James Kvaal acknowledged the challenges last year. The department had to update its systems because they were “older than some of the parents filling out the form” and to accommodate the new law, which required linking IRS data to the FAFSA.
Technical problems led to significant delays in processing the applications.
“It was like a 500-car pileup,” said Bryce McKibben, who helped write the law as a policy adviser for the Senate HELP committee. Department officials had asked for an extension to implement the new FAFSA. But it still didn’t prove enough time to fix the problems, said McKibben, now the senior director of policy and advocacy at Temple University’s Hope Center for Student Basic Needs.
“Something like this, in the private sector, you’d want to do millions or billions of examples and test runs,” McKibben said. “And they just didn’t have the time to do all that.”
By the end of summer 2024, FAFSA submissions were down 9% among first-time applications, according to the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.
Before launching this year’s FAFSA, the Education Department beta-tested the form with various stakeholders, including groups of students who had trouble with it last year. Things worked well enough that the form was released 10 days before its planned release on Dec. 1. According to Kvaal, 1.5 million FAFSA forms have been submitted so far, and the department processes each in about one day on average.
“We’re hearing pretty good feedback,” he said. “And we’re not done — we’ve got more work to do to make this process easier.”